Integrated Calendar

10:15 Refreshments
13:00 Informal Lunch talk

Understanding and controlling functional materials at the nanoscale is a major goal of materials science, chemistry and physics, allowing the field to continuously pioneer also the high-tech industry. Nano-functional systems, such as ferroic and superconducting materials form an elegant platform for studying the onset of collective interactions in nature in general and chemistry in particular. Likewise, the ‘collectiveness’ of these materials facilitates them for technologies, including low-power computers, mainstream cellular antennae, single photon detectors and quantum computers. Nevertheless, to-date, the onset of collectiveness in these smart nano materials has remained elusive to us, mainly due to challenges associated with controlling and imaging the collective properties near the onset of the phenomena.
We will discuss a recently-found universal scaling law that describes superconductivity close to its emergence, allowing us to learn how material properties dictate size effects in superconductivity. I will also demonstrate how the discovered universality helps improve material preparation with controlled functionality, affecting both the fundamental study of superconductivity, e.g. by enabling graphene-superconductor and amorphous-crystalline hybrids in the ultrathin regime (< 20 nm). The significance to miniaturised superconducting-based devices will also be presented. Using the improved functionality, we will examine how the competition between material properties and intrinsic superconducting properties can be tuned with the control on the materials structure.
I will also demonstrate how the longstanding dispute over the ferroelectric domain switching mechanism can be resolved when introducing recently-discovered ferroelectric-ferroelastic domain types. We will also examine by means of direct observation ferroelectric domain pinning due to structural defects. These observations were allowed thanks to a new method that allows an order of magnitude enhancement of ferroelectric domain imaging, with respect to the traditional methods.