Applied Physics Seminar | Manipulation of Quantum Materials via Uniaxial Stress

Abstract:
A major question in basic physical research is how to understand the collective behavior of interacting quantum objects that cannot be treated as non-interacting particles. Many-body interactions in complex quantum materials are an ideal platform because the interactions cause fascinating phenomena such as high-temperature superconductivity, exotic magnetic systems, correlated topological materials, and many others. In addition, four fundamental degrees of freedom, lattice, charge, orbital, and spin, provide strong tunability on the exotic properties, which allow enhancing our understanding of interacting quantum objects. Strain is a novel way of approaching the four parameters without extrinsic perturbations. In this talk, a modern uniaxial stress device for electrical transport and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) will be introduced. With the device, we studied the fundamental response of electronic structure as a function of strain, which contains key information about the intrinsic physical properties of quantum materials. I will also discuss our recent findings of tuning of the multipolar Berry curvature in altermagnet MnTe.