Dr. Cristian Ciobanu, Professor in Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science Department at Colorado School of Mines, will give a seminar titled "Computational Design for Novel Piezoelectrics" to the interested faculty and students at Discovery Park.

Abstract

Coupling between the mechanical degrees of freedom and the electric polarization in a solid, a hallmark of piezoelectric materials, enables applications that range from sensors, resonators, motors, and actuators, to high-resolution ultrasound devices and miniature filters for cellular communications. Interestingly, only about ten piezoelectric materials (e.g., quartz, perovskites such as lead zirconate titanate and related materials, AlN, and ZnO), are technologically relevant and cover virtually all of these applications. Expanding the pool of known piezoelectric materials would help broaden the range of applications and allow earth-abundant and non-toxic replacements for materials that are presently in use. The need for new relevant materials currently drives computational-driven discovery and design of piezoelectrics, as well as that pertaining to broad classes of multiferroics. This talk will present results on the computational design of several classes of materials (wurtzite-based, 2D-based, etc), assessing the progress to date, predicted expanded ranges for piezoelectric and mechanical properties, as well as theoretical limits on their tunability.

Biography

Cristian Ciobanu is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Program at Colorado School of Mines. He earned his BSc from University of Bucharest (Physics, 1995), and MSc and PhD in Physics from The Ohio State University, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. After a postdoctoral stage in the (former) Division of Engineering at Brown University, he joined the Colorado School of Mines in 2004. His research interests are in computational materials design, in particular: novel multifunctional materials, nanoscale surface problems, two-dimensional materials, materials for renewable energy applications, developments of evolutionary algorithms for computational materials design and optimization of atomic structures, self-organized nano and bio structures on crystal surfaces, among others. Professor Ciobanu is a Fellow of Institute of Physics and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a lifetime member of the American Physical Society and The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, as well as the current Chair of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Vacuum Society. He has authored over 100 refereed journal publications, numerous conference articles and presentation, and a book on the atomic structure of surfaces and nanostructures.