Peter and other members of the UM MSE graduate student council organized and ran an outreach event at local Forsythe Middle School. There, volunteers taught a class on metallurgy and materials science, demo-ing metal casting and using our portable SEM to look at material microstructures. They presented to over 200 students over the course of 2 days, who had a great time learning about materials science
This event was sponsored in part by Joyworks Studio, who donated the pewter for casting and allowed us to give students a part to take home that they cast themselves.

Peter chaired the ferroelectrics session and gave a contributed talk at the 2018 Conference on Electronic and Advanced Materials this January, in Orlando, FL. His talk was about our recent work on entropy stabilized oxides and disorder dependent effects on magnetic structure. The abstract is provided below, and a big thanks to the American Ceramic Society.

Abstract: Entropy-stabilized materials are stabilized by the configurational entropy of the constituents, rather than the enthalpy of formation of the compound. A unique benefit to entropic stabilization is the increased solubility of elements, which opens a broad compositional space with subsequent local chemical and structural disorder resulting from different atomic sizes and preferred coordinations of the constituents. As the magnetic and electronic properties of oxides are strongly correlated to their chemistry and electronic structure, entropy stabilization could lead to interesting and novel properties. Anisotropic magnetic exchange and the presence of a critical blocking temperature indicates that the entropy-stabilized oxides considered here are antiferromagnetic. Changing the composition of the oxide tunes the disorder and exchange bias and here we exploit this tunability to enhance the strength of the exchange field by a factor of 10x at low temperatures, when compared to a CoO heterostructure. Significant deviations from the rule of mixtures are observed in the structural and magnetic parameters, indicating that the crystal is dominated by configurational entropy. Our results reveal that the unique characteristics of entropy stabilized materials can be utilized to engineer magnetic functional phenomena in oxide thin films.

Two of Peter’s science art images were chosen to go on the materials science department annual calendar. The chosen images show the magnetic structure of entropy stabilized oxides and target ablation during pulsed laser deposition.

Abstract: Entropy-stabilized materials are stabilized by the configurational entropy of the constituents, rather than the enthalpy of formation of the compound. These materials have attracted significant interest due to the apparent deviations from Gibbs phase rule and desirable mechanical properties. Despite the discovery of high entropy crystals nearly 15 years ago, reported investigations outside transition metal alloys have just recently been extended to ionic crystals, particularly oxides, a class of materials which can demonstrate useful and dynamic functional properties such as ferroelectricity, magnetoelectricity, thermoelectricity, and superconductivity. As the magnetic and electronic properties of oxides are strongly correlated to their chemistry and electronic structure, the concept of entropy stabilization could lead to interesting and novel properties. Though known entropy-stabilized oxides contain magnetic constituents, the magnetic properties of the multi-component oxide have yet to be investigated. Here we examine the role of entropy and composition on the exchange coupling and magnetic anisotropy of permalloy/(Mg0.25(1-x)CoxNi0.25(1-x)Cu0.25(1-x)Zn0.25(1-x))O thin film heterostructures. We observe a strong exchange field and an apparent deviation from the rule of mixtures in the structural and magnetic parameters. This result demonstrates that entropy stabilized oxides can be engineered to show concerted magnetic properties that are dependent on constituent species, yet differ from a simple weighed average of the components and can result in unexpected phenomena.

New Publication!- Meisenheimer, P. B., Kratofil, T. J. & Heron, J. T. Giant Enhancement of Exchange Coupling in Entropy-Stabilized Oxide Heterostructures. Sci. Rep. 7, 13344 (2017).

Abstract: Entropy-stabilized materials are stabilized by the configurational entropy of the constituents, rather than the enthalpy of formation of the compound. A unique benefit to entropy-stabilized materials is the increased solubility of elements, which opens a broad compositional space, with subsequent local chemical and structural disorder resulting from different atomic sizes and preferred coordinations of the constituents. Known entropy-stabilized oxides contain magnetically interesting constituents, however, the magnetic properties of the multi-component oxide have yet to be investigated. Here we examine the role of disorder and composition on the exchange anisotropy of permalloy/(Mg0.25(1-x)CoxNi0.25(1-x)Cu0.25(1-x)Zn0.25(1-x))O heterostructures. Anisotropic magnetic exchange and the presence of a critical blocking temperature indicates that the magnetic order of the entropy-stabilized oxides considered here is antiferromagnetic. Changing the composition of the oxide tunes the disorder, exchange field and magnetic anisotropy. Here, we exploit this tunability to enhance the strength of the exchange field by a factor of 10x at low temperatures, when compared to a permalloy/CoO heterostructure. Significant deviations from the rule of mixtures are observed in the structural and magnetic parameters, indicating that the crystal is dominated by configurational entropy. Our results reveal that the unique characteristics of entropy-stabilized materials can be utilized and tailored to engineer magnetic functional phenomena in oxide thin films.

Full text available from Nature Scientific Reports.