Rohan Mishra
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Materials Science·Early-career
How a material behaves, whether it bends light in unusual ways or moves electric charge on its own, depends on how its atoms are arranged. These two projects use theory, computer simulation and data-driven materials discovery to predict new semiconductors with useful properties.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
ferroelectric semiconductors
chalcogenides
optical anisotropy
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Mar 2030
What they work on
- Identify low-loss chalcogenides with large optical anisotropy, meaning light behaves differently along different directions, using density functional theory and materials informatics to screen compounds containing transition metals.
- Grow candidate optical chalcogenides by vapor transport and pulsed laser deposition, then tune their anisotropy with alloying and ion bombardment, measuring structure and polarized-light response with X-ray, neutron, electron and optical methods.
- Predict new stable ferroelectric semiconductors, materials with a switchable built-in electric field, using density functional theory, group-theoretical symmetry analysis and materials informatics.
- Determine how microstructure and composition shape the properties of synthesized ferroelectric semiconductors, combining electron microscopy with density functional theory calculations.
More about the research
The best candidates are then made and tested. The goal is to design crystals with built-in, direction-dependent properties for electronics, energy and light-based technologies.
Why it matters
New light-controlling crystals could enable faster light-based communication, better sensors, mixed reality displays, photon routers for quantum computers and laser manufacturing tools. Ferroelectric semiconductors could make devices for energy generation and storage and for information storage and processing more efficient, because they would not need the internal junctions that waste energy in current designs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andre Mkhoyan
University of Minnesota, MN·Materials Science
Identify the atomic structure and chemical makeup of unconventional line defects in perovskite oxide (ABO3) thin films using atomic-resolution analytical scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM).
Aldo Romero
West Virginia University, WV·Materials Science
Extend the DMFTwDFT code into a unified open-source framework combining DFT, DFT+U and dynamical mean field theory on the VASP and SIESTA codes, supporting both collinear and noncollinear magnetic configurations.
Yubo Qi
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Physics
Develop a deep-learning-based, multifunctional computational method that reproduces density functional theory predictions of electron behavior while scaling to systems far larger than direct calculations allow.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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