Glycerol is a well-known molecular glass former that appears in several natural and engineered systems and has applications in cryopreservation, amorphous drug formulations, and stabilization of biomolecules. As it is cooled, the viscosity and structural relaxation time, of the liquid rapidly increase until the system falls out of metastable equilibrium and becomes trapped in an amorphous...
Rare events like crystal nucleation in mildly supercooled liquids occur infrequently but proceed rapidly, resulting in the waiting time for their occurrence being much longer than the timescale of the microscopic dynamics. Activated processes are analyzed through free energy landscapes defined on one or more appropriate reaction coordinates, where transitions between states require overcoming...
Understanding the mechanisms present behind ice growth in a system of liquid water has posed many challenges, primarily due to the difficulties associated with simulating and quantifying these behaviours microscopically. Here, we make use of previously established molecular dynamics methodologies with the express goal of simulating the steady state growth and melting of ice. The standard TIP4P...
Resonant soft x-ray scattering (RSXS) has established itself to be one of the most powerful techniques for studying complex electronic ordering phenomena in quantum materials. Different from conventional x-ray scattering, RSXS merges diffraction methods and x-ray absorption spectroscopy, providing not only a unique elemental, site, and valence specificity, but also an enhanced sensitivity to...
The air-sensitive Ca5Sb2(NH)2 is studied by soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and emission spectroscopy (XES), which directly probe the partial electronic density of states of the conduction band and valence band, respectively. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations are performed to compare with the measured spectra. The second derivatives of measured N K-edge XES and XAS...
Topological materials offer many interesting quantum phenomena such as anomalous Hall effect (AHE), topological Hall effect (THE), quantum spin liquid state, and skyrmion lattice. Among these materials, Mn3+xGe is one of the interesting quantum materials as it has a triangular spin lattice in the kagome network. Due to this arrangement, collinear antiferromagnetic (AFM) alignment is impossible...
Graphene oxide (GO) is the oxidized form of graphene. GO is known for its complex non-stoichiometric structure and unique optical, electronic, and chemical properties which contributes to many applications in electronic devices and is a good precursor for synthesizing reduced graphene at a large scale. Despite being one of the most promising materials, the detailed structure of GO remains...
Water, albeit an extremely simple chemical, is the most important for human life and the growth of our society. It is a vital resource for our health, food, and energy production. As the demand for water steadily continues to increase, researchers have begun to dedicate an incredible amount of resources to study it. It should be noted that in order to solve wide-scale and societal problems...
Title: The effect of quasi-one-dimensional confinement on dynamical heterogeneities in glass forming liquids.
Abstract:
Confined fluids display unique characteristics in comparison to bulk fluids. The geometrical constraint of the confining walls introduces incommensurate length scales in particle-particle and particle-wall interactions which lead to fundamental changes in the phase...
The development of high-efficiency light-emitting diodes (LEDs) relies on advanced luminescent materials that enhance their performance. BaSiP3N7:Eu²⁺ has emerged as a promising phosphor due to its strong luminescence properties. To gain deeper insight into its electronic and optical behavior, we employed a combination of experimental techniques, including X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS),...
Transition metals (TM) are d-block elements with partially or completely filled d-orbitals. They display unique and complex behaviors, including variable oxidation states, strong electron correlations, and intricate crystal field effects. Transition metal compounds are technologically and fundamentally important and exhibit a number of interesting effects that can be exploited in applications....
Characterizing a newly synthesized germanium nitridophosphate, GeP2N4, revealed several interesting aspects of the sample. It is structurally unique to other known MP2N4 systems (M = Be, Ca, Sr, Ba, Mn, Cd) due to the presence of Ge2+ lone pairs that reside within rings of PN4 tetrahedra. Our group makes use of several different techniques to perform these characterizations. Primarily, we...
There exists about three different ways of stacking 1D Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chains, and creating an SSH sheet, in such a way that the couplings are alternating in both (x and y) directions, which is the key component of the SSH model. It is known that whereas the original, one dimensional, SSH model had topological edge states, the two dimensional version has edge and corner states. We...
Uncovering Fermi surface geometry and scattering mechanisms can lead to important insights into the physics of strongly correlated electron systems. Angle dependent magnetoresistance (ADMR) measurements are a tool to obtain this information that has been used widely in layered metals such as organic charge transfer salts and cuprates. Simple analytic expressions for ADMR based on isotropic...
