Conveners
Condensed Matter and Nanostructure Physics
- Christophe Detavernier (UGent)
The properties of materials are determined by the positions of the atoms, their chemical nature and the bonding between them. Therefore, reaching atomic resolution in 3D has been the ultimate goal in the field of electron tomography for many years. One of the possibilities to perform electron tomography with atomic resolution is by applying reconstruction algorithms based on compressive...
Thin films constitute the building blocks of a large number of modern technologies including protective coatings, microelectronic devices, bio-responsive membranes and photovoltaic cells. These nano-layers exhibit vastly different mechanical properties from their bulk counterpart. New measurement techniques are therefore required to accurately and reliably measure the mechanical properties of...
For more than 40 years now, single wavelength and spectroscopic ellipsometry have been intensively used to determine optical properties as well as thickness of multilayered materials (see e.g. [1]). Principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) are multivariate analysis methods respectively used for dimension data reduction and classification, respectively [2, 3]....
A characteristic property of superfluidity and -conductivity is the presence of quantized vortices in rotating systems. To study the BEC-BCS crossover the two most common methods are the Bogoliubov-De Gennes (BdG) theory and the usage of an effective field theory (EFT). In order to simplify the calculations for single vortices, it is often assumed that the hyperbolic tangent yields a good...
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a versatile class of crystalline materials showing great promise in a wide range of applications (e.g. gas sensing and storage, luminescence, pressure sensors, catalysis, …). In addition, their very structure puts them at several cross-sections: classical solids and molecules, surfaces and bulk,… Furthermore, since they combine properties either intrinsic to...
Recently, superconductivity in strontium titanate and at the SrTiO3-LaAlO3 interface became a subject of renewed interest because of specific properties of SrTiO3. The superconducting phase transition in these systems occurs at very low temperatures combined with low carrier densities. Strontium titanate is a strongly polar crystal where the Fröhlich electron – LO-phonon interaction dominates...
Colloidal quantum dots are nanometer sized semiconductor crystalllites obtained by solution-based synthesis. They exhibit unique optical and electronic properties that depend on their size, shape and composition. In combination with their suitability for solution processing, many applications are found for these novel materials, ranging from lasing, lighting, photovoltaic devices to...
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a novel approach to design alloys with promising properties has been introduced [1]. High-Entropy Alloys (HEAs) are composed of five or more principal elements in equimolar ratios. The high mixing entropy significantly reduces the Gibbs free energy of the solid solution, hence single-phase multi-component solid solutions are thermodynamically stable,...
Surface engineering of micro- and nanoparticles is of great importance in fields such as catalysis, energy, sensing and additive manufacturing. For many of these applications particles are required with different bulk and surface properties. A popular technique to achieve this is to coat the particle surface with a nanometer thick layer. Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is known as a reliable...
