From Lab to Limelight: PhD Candidates Take Gold and Silver at MRS

Shahriar Muhammad Nahid was awarded the Silver Graduate Student Award for his work on ferroelectricity in 2D materials. Typical ferroelectric materials are three dimensionally bonded. While these 3D ferroelectrics are useful for many applications such as in low-powered electronics and non-volatile memory, they also face some limitations.   

"If you're thinning down 3D ferroelectric material to say, only 10s of nanometers, then often the ferroelectricity becomes unstable. This is mainly due to the surface dangling bonds. However, 2D ferroelectrics don’t have the surface bonds, so they are stable, even in less than a nanometer thickness," said Nahid. 

Nahid’s doctoral research focuses on how 2D materials and their unique properties can be utilized to overcome the challenges of 3D ferroelectrics. At the MRS Spring Meeting, he presented his work on the photovoltaic effect of 2D ferroelectric materials.  

“For more than 50 years, people have known about the photovoltaic effect in ferroelectrics. But, still, there is an open question about its origin. And it is pretty important if you want to design self-powered electronic devices based on ferroelectric materials,” said Nahid. 

Nahid, under the supervision of his advisors, Professor Arend van der Zande and Professor SungWoo Nam (now at University of California, Irvine), experimentally identified that the depolarization field is the underlying mechanism for the ferroelectric photovoltaic effect in a 2D ferroelectric material, α-In2Se3. This work was recently published in ACS Nano.  

Nahid wants to build his career in academia and continue conducting research in nanoscience.