Research in the faculty

Condensed matter

Particle & Astroparticle

News & Updates

  • Congratulations to Dr. Rinat Goren

    Recipient of
    Scientific Council Prize for Outstanding Staff Scientists
    Date: 
    May 25, 2023
  • Congratulations to Dr. David Mross

    Recipient of
    Morris L. Levinson Prize in Physics
    Date: 
    May 25, 2023
  • Congratulations to Inbar Savoray

    Awarded the Yoel Racah prize for an outstanding theoretical PhD student
    Date: 
    April 20, 2023

Upcoming events

  • Physics Colloquium

    Elastic Strain Engineering for Unprecedented Properties

    Colloquia
    Date:
    01
    June, 2023
    Thursday
    Hour: 11:15-12:30
    | Prof. Ju Li, MIT – Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
    The emergence of “ultra-strength materials” that can withstand significant fractions of the ideal strength at component scale without any inelastic relaxation harbingers a new field within mechanics of materials. Recently, we have experimentally achieved more than 13% reversible tensile strains in Si that fundamentally redefines what it means to be Si, and ~7% uniform tensile strain in micron-scale single-crystalline diamond bridge arrays, where thousands of transistors and quantum sensors can be integrated in one diamond microbridge. Elastic Strain Engineering (ESE) aims to endow material structures with very large stresses and stress gradients to guide electronic, photonic, and spin excitations and control energy, mass, and information flows. As “smaller is stronger” for most engineering materials at room temperature, a much larger dynamical range of tensile-and-shear deviatoric stresses for small-scale structures can be achieved, as the defect (e.g., dislocation, crack) population dynamics change from defect-propagation to defect-nucleation controlled. Thus, all six stress components can be used to tune the physical and chemical properties of a material like a 7-element alloy. Four pillars of ESE need to be addressed experimentally and computationally: (a) making materials and structures that can withstand deviatoric elastic strain patterns that are exceptionally large and extended in space-time volume, inhomogeneous, dynamically reversible, or combinations thereof, (b) measuring and understanding how functional properties such as photonic and electronic characteristics vary with imposed elastic strain tensor, (c) characterizing and modeling the mechanisms of stress relaxations; the goal is not to use them for forming but to defeat them at service temperatures (usually room temperature and above) and extended timescales, and (d) computational design based on first principles, e.g. predicting ideal strength surface, topological changes in band structures, etc. assisted by machine learning.