Emergent and Unconventional Ordering in Thin-film Materials
Speaker
Jonathan E. Spanier
Drexel University
Abstract
Emergent and Unconventional Ordering in Thin-film Materials
Ordering in solids, including cation arrangement, electronic charge and spin, lattice distortions, and their couplings, governs the behavior of many functional materials. These intertwined degrees of freedom define an energy landscape in which boundary conditions reorganize structure and emergent properties. Thin-film synthesis provides a direct means to reshape that landscape.
Thermodynamic and kinetic control during epitaxial growth enables phases and responses inaccessible in bulk equilibrium form. Epitaxial stabilization can shift structural and ferroelectric phase boundaries, allowing a phase normally confined to higher temperatures to emerge at unexpectedly low temperature. Refined growth can also produce exceptional interfacial crystalline quality in a ferroelectric nitride, minimizing extrinsic effects and revealing intrinsic response. These cases illustrate how synthesis reshapes phase stability and exposes fundamental material behavior.
Strain-engineered oxide thin films further host emergent polar textures arising from competing instabilities. Combining advanced characterization with multi-scale modeling, we probe how cation chemistry and epitaxial constraint govern unconventional ferroic and multiferroic phase evolution and enable reconfigurable polar states. Together, these studies demonstrate how controlling correlated order provides a pathway to discovering and engineering functional states in solids, with implications for low-energy electronics and quantum information technologies.
Bio
Dr. Jonathan E. Spanier is the Hess Family Chair Professor in Engineering and Physics at Drexel University, where he also serves, since 2020, as Department Head of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Columbia University and completed postdoctoral fellowship in physical chemistry at Harvard University before joining the Drexel faculty in 2003. Prior to his academic career, he held research and technical staff positions at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in physical acoustics and in the semiconductor industry. Dr. Spanier received the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Distinguished Service Award from the Louis R. Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and a Japan Trust International Research Cooperation Fellowship from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, during which he served as a visiting scientist at Fujitsu. A participant in the NAE Frontiers of Engineering, Dr. Spanier was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, Division of Materials Physics, in 2016 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2024.