University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center

2023 Award Year IRGs

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Directing Spin, Charge, and Energy with 2D Strainscapes (2023 IRG1)
The goal of our interdisciplinary team is to establish the basic science for how strainscapes (combinations of anisotropic strain, strain gradients and interfacial heterostrain) may be used to manipulate the flow of charge, spin, and energy across length scales.
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Photo-Ionics: Controlling Ion Transport and Defects with Light (2023 IRG2)
In IRG2, we are establishing the field of photo-ionics, in which electronically-mediated light-ion interactions control defect populations and macroscopic fluxes of defects and ions.

2017 Award Year IRGs

The interdisciplinary research in IRG-MAX (Metallic Antiferromagnets and the eXcitations) is designed to advance understanding of the synthesis-structure-property relationships of metallic antiferromagnetic materials.
The interdisciplinary team in IRG 2 seeks to address a grand challenge in materials research of bridging the electronic design capability of hard electronic materials with the soft, adaptive and three-dimensional nature of biology.

Seeds and Superseeds

The goal of the I-MRSEC Seed program is to bring new ideas and people into the Center. Projects can either align with current MRSEC research themes or form the foundation for new distinct directions.

The goal of our interdisciplinary team is to develop model light-responsive switchable polymers with engineered defects, to precisely control ion transport and mechanical properties for applications in flexible electronics.
This project seeks to understand how local, nanoscale strain fields induced during the fabrication of single photon emitters affect their optical properties, and, based on this understanding, develop a method to engineering strain to control these properties.