Title:

Engineering functionality through dynamic visualization and control of atomic motions

Speaker:

Dr. Aditya Sood

Affiliation:

Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Sciences

When:

Monday, February 7, 2022 at 3:00:00 PM   Add to Calendar

Where:

MRDC Building, Room 4211

Host:

Satish Kumar
satish.kumar@me.gatech.edu

Abstract

Advances in energy, computing, and medicine rely on the discovery of dynamic materials, whose properties can be tuned in real time via external stimuli. From an application standpoint, this is key to engineering smart systems that can adapt to changing environments. This new paradigm necessitates a microscopic understanding of how materials respond to transient perturbations, and fundamentally, of whether impulsive excitations can create novel states of matter not accessible under equilibrium conditions. In this seminar, I will present three examples of functionality arising from the dynamic modulation of atomic structure on timescales spanning twelve orders of magnitude. On the timescale of seconds, I will show how electrochemical ion insertion can drive reversible tuning of heat transport, for applications in dynamic thermal management. On the microsecond timescale, I will demonstrate how electrical excitation of a phase-changing oxide can trigger the formation of a metastable electronic state, with implications for low-energy computing. Finally, on the picosecond timescale, I will discuss how ultrafast optical excitation can induce giant enhancement of thermal energy transfer rates across atomic junctions, a finding that is crucial to engineering next-generation optoelectronic devices. These results illustrate the power of dynamic control as a transformative tool for on-demand programming of materials, with applications ranging from energy harvesting to brain-like computing.

Biography

Dr. Aditya Sood is a Research Scientist at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at Stanford University & SLAC National Laboratory, working with Prof. Aaron Lindenberg and Prof. William Chueh. He earned his B.Tech. and Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Stanford University, respectively, both in Materials Science and Engineering. His Ph.D. research was done under the supervision of Prof. Kenneth Goodson in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, in close collaboration with the group of Prof. Eric Pop in Electrical Engineering. He has received the Batra Gold Medal from IIT Kanpur for outstanding undergraduate performance in 2011, the Gold Graduate Student Award from the Materials Research Society for his Ph.D. work in 2017, and the Young Investigator Award from SLAC National Laboratory for his postdoctoral research in 2021. His interests are at the intersection of thermal transport, nanoelectronics, and ultrafast physics, with a focus on visualizing and controlling atomistic dynamics across a range of technologically relevant timescales. For more information, see https://sites.google.com/view/adityasood

Notes

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