UTA/NU Partnership for Functional Materials

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), located in the heart of the economically thriving, ethnically diverse Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, is a major university in North Texas designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) with an enrollment of about 50,000 students and more than 45% underrepresented minority (URM) undergraduates. The goal of this Partnership in Research and Education in Materials (PREM)SEED project between UTA and the Northwestern University (NU) Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) is to establish (i) an interdisciplinary collaborative cutting-edge research program on functional materials; and (ii) an educational pipeline for URM students by providing research and educational opportunities, comprehensive student mentoring, and professional development programs.

The partnership involves reciprocal faculty visits and exposure of students to research and facilities at NU. Undergraduate research is a core strategy for recruiting and retaining URM students in materials research along with programs in research experience for undergraduates at NU. The PREM program also involves the participation of Grambling State University (GSU), an HBCU institution, and the establishment of a network at UTA with GSU and other URM-serving institutions and national organizations to enable long-term, sustainable recruiting of URM students.

This PREM SEED project addresses two key fundamental aspects of functional materials research with major technological and societal impact. In the first focus area, electron transport and energy filtering across mixed-dimensional heterostructures will be explored. Thermal excitation of electrons broadens the electron energy distribution, which obscures or prevents the emergence of novel phenomena.

A quantum state will be used as an energy filter, suppressing electron thermal distribution, and lowering the effective electron temperature. Therefore, electron transport through quantum states of different dimensionalities will be studied and the resulting electron energy distribution will be measured electrically and optically. This fundamental research has important applicability in quantum information technologies, energy-efficient electronics, and spintronics.

The second focus area will deliver new hetero-anionic semiconductor functional materials with tunable properties that are otherwise inaccessible from simpler homo-anionic structures and chemistries. Advances in the computational identification of new, thermodynamically stable compounds will be leveraged, and the new compounds will be subjected to rigorous computer-aided prediction of optoelectronic properties.

Time-efficient and energy-efficient synthetic routes for synthesizing these materials will be realized for rapid screening and technological implementation. The effort focuses on a largely overlooked materials class that promises tunable band structure along with high electronic mobility and optoelectronic attributes that are crucial for technological applications, such as solar energy conversion, magnetic, and optoelectronic devices.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.