By Heike Brueckner
Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) doctoral candidate Jialan Zhang was recently awarded the Best Oral Paper Prize at the 22nd Connecticut Microelectronics and Optoelectronics Consortium.
Jialan’s oral presentation focused on her work involving “Electrocaloric Properties of Epitaxial Strontium Titanate Films,” which she is conducting in collaboration with her thesis advisor, Dr. S. Pamir Alpay, and associate advisor, Dr. George A. Rossetti, Jr., both MSE professors at UConn, as well as alumnus Dr. I. Burc Misirlioglu (Ph.D. ’05), a professor at Sabanci University in Turkey.
She explains that, when exposed to an external electric field, a polarizable material undergoes a temperature variation. This is called the electrocaloric effect, and materials with high electrocaloric responses have the potential to be used as on-chip heating and cooling elements in microelectronics.
Jialan’s work demonstrates how the choice of polarizable material, substrate, growth or annealing temperature, and electrode configuration can be used to optimize the electrocaloric properties.
The consortium, involving seven Connecticut colleges and universities, was held at Yale University in New Haven on March 13, 2013.
