Physics Commons^™

Charge, Bonding, And Magneto-Elastic Coupling In Nanomaterials, Qi Sun

Doctoral Dissertations

Phonons are exquisitely sensitive to finite length scale effects in a wide variety of materials because they are intimately connected to charge, structure, and magnetism, and a quantitative analysis of their behavior can reveal microscopic aspects of chemical bonding and spin-phonon coupling. To investigate these effects, we measured infrared vibrational properties of bulk and nanoscale MoS₂ [molybdenum disulfide], MnO [manganese(II) oxide], and CoFe₂O₄ [cobalt iron oxide]. From an analysis of frequencies, oscillator strengths, and high-frequency dielectric constants, we extracted Born and local effective charges, and polarizability for MoS₂ and MnO. For MoS₂ nanoparticles, in …

Condensed Matter From Gauge/Gravity Duality, Jason Edward Therrien

Doctoral Dissertations

Currently strongly coupled systems present the greatest challenge to theoretical physics. For years conventional methods of approach have failed to describe these systems analytically. In recent years it has been shown that there is a duality between weakly coupled and strongly coupled systems, the Gauge Theory/Gravity Duality. In this dissertation I will discuss how the AdS/CFT is used to describe strongly coupled condensed matter systems as well as present the work done by the author and collaborators.

Growth And Characterization Of Hexagonal Lu-Fe-O Multiferroic Thin Films, Wenbin Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

In the quest for new types of information processing and storage, complex oxides stand out as one of the most promising material classes. The multiple functionalities of complex oxides naturally arise from the delicate energy balance between the various forms of order (structural, electronic, magnetic). In particular, multiferroic and magnetoelectric oxides which simultaneously exhibit more than one type of ferroic orders have many advantages over existing materials. Widespread practical applications will require a single-phase multiferroic material with a transition temperature that lies considerably above room temperature, large electric and magnetic polarizations, and strong coupling between ferroic orders.

Recently, multiferroic LuFe …

Structure And Dynamics Of High Temperature Superconductors, Jennifer Lynn Niedziela

Doctoral Dissertations

High temperature superconductivity in iron based compounds has presented a series of complex problems to condensed matter physics since being discovered in 2008. The stalwart basis of condensed matter physics is the “strength in numbers" aspect of crystalline periodicity. Perfect crystalline periodicity has made possible the reduction of the questions of structural and electronic properties to single dimensions, increasing the tractability of these problems. Nevertheless, modern complex materials stretch these assumptions to their limits, and it is at this point where our work starts. Using neutron and x-ray scattering, we have conducted a series of studies on the structural disorder …

Magnetic Excitations In The Iron Based Superconductors, Leland Weldon Harriger

Doctoral Dissertations

Presented within are neutron scattering studies detailing the spin dynamics of BaNi$_{x}$Fe$_{2-x}$As$_{2}$ for x = 0 (parent), 0.04 (underdoped), and 0.1 (optimal) dopings, and FeSe$_{x}$Te$_{1-x}$ for x = 0 (parent), 0.3 (underdoped), and 0.4 (optimal) dopings. These recently discovered Fe-based superconducting compounds are strikingly similar, in many respects, to the cuprate class of unconventional superconductors and share qualitatively similar phase diagrams consisting of a long range ordered magnetic ground state in the parents which, upon doping, is supplanted in favor of superconductivity. The dopings discussed herein allow us to tune through the phase diagram, beginning with long range ordered parents …

Study Of Local Structure, Stress And Dynamics In Disordered Materials Using Ab-Initio And Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Madhusudan Ojha

Doctoral Dissertations

Understanding the atomic structure and dynamics in structurally disordered systems has been a long-standing and most challenging problem in physics and material science. To begin with, it is difficult to describe disorder quantitatively and to differentiate the degree of disorder from one system to another. The majorities of experimental and theoretical approaches to the study of disordered systems are either transferred directly from the study of crystals or address the problem in the macroscopic scale where the atomic origin of behavior is obscured. First principle atomic level stresses and dynamic pair distribution functions described in this dissertation represent attempts to …

Iron Pnictides: Superconductivity In Multi-Orbital Systems, Andrew David Nicholson

Doctoral Dissertations

This work focuses on the development and implementation of microscopic models as well as their numerical and analytical study to elucidate the properties of the iron pnictides. There are many first principle and phenomenological studies of these materials, but there is a need for unbiased numerical calculations following an approach similar to the one used in the study of the Hubbard and t-J models for the cuprates.

First a two orbital model for the pnictides, focusing on two hybridized Fe-d orbitals (dxz and dyz) is formulated, including hoppings between nearest and next nearest neighbors as well as on site Coulomb …

Morphology-Properties Studies In Laser Synthesized Nanostructured Materials, Nozomi Shirato

Doctoral Dissertations

Synthesis of well-defined nanostructures by pulsed laser melting is an interesting subject from both a funda- mental and technological point of view. In this thesis, the synthesis and functional properties of potentially useful materials were studied, such as tin dioxide nanostructured arrays, which have potential applications in hydrogen gas sensing, and ferromagnetic Co nanowire and nanomagnets, which are fundamentally im- portant towards understanding magnetism in the nanoscale. First, the formation of 1D periodic tin dioxide nanoarrays was investigated with the goal of forming nanowires for hydrogen sensing. Experimental obser- vations combined with theoretical modeling successfully explained the mechanisms of structure …

Numerical Study Of The Transition Metal Oxides And The Transport Properties Of Iron Pnictides, Shuhua Liang

Doctoral Dissertations

Strongly correlated materials such as the manganites and iron pnictides are studied here with several computational techniques. Both types of materials contain transition metals. Thus, our computational models are based on the double exchange mechanism, the super exchange mechanism and the crystal field theory to describe the d electrons. In manganites, we focus on its multiferroic properties induced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. In the BiFeO3 , we use classical Monte Carlo simulations to study the magnetic critical transition transition. In iron pnictides, we study the interplay between the Fermi surface orbital order and the ground state magnetic order.

Theoretical Modeling Of The Formation And Functionality Of Low-Dimensional Materials, Hua Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents a series of work under the topic of designing and modeling novel low-dimensional materials and structures with desired and coherent structural, electronic, and magnetic properties, using a variety of theoretical tools, including first-principles density functional theory (DFT) method, numerical Monte Carlo (MC) method, and analytical phenomenological approaches, etc. The contents are divided into three major topics:

(1) Magnetic properties of n-p codoped materials. The noncompensated n-p codoping method is proposed to increase the density of magnetic dopants in diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) while keeping the magnetic coupling strength, which may lead to a …

Theoretical Study On Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking In Strongly Correlated Electrons, Xiaotian Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

In the early days of condensed matter physics, the single electron approximation was considered to be a very good approach in order to explore the properties of many systems. However, as time goes on, a variety of new systems have been discovered and many of them, such as high temperature superconductors and manganites, show phenomenas that evidently can not be explained by single electron theories. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a very important and famous concept in physics, from the Higgs mechanism in particle physics to the spin density wave in condensed matter physics. The present text describes the detailed studies …