Massimiliano Stengel

Massimiliano Stengel

Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Massimiliano Stengel graduated in Physics at the University of Trieste (1999) and received his PhD in Science from the Swiss Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) in 2004. From February 2005 to April 2009 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Nicola Spaldin at the Materials Department (UC Santa Barbara), and from May to September 2009 at CECAM (EPFL) under the supervision of Prof. Wanda Andreoni. From February 2010 to September 2011 he worked at ICMAB in Barcelona as a "Ramón y Cajal" fellow, before joining ICREA as a Research Professor in October 2011.


Research interests

My research develops and uses frontier electronic-structure methods to tackle key fundamental and technological questions in ferroelectricity, magnetism, surface science and metal/oxide interfaces. In the past few years I have focused on perovskite thin films, and in particular on understanding how the reduced size affects their functional properties. I am currently interested in the study of novel functionalities in oxide-based systems (e.g. flexoelectricity, magnetoelectric effects, confined electron gases, improper ferroelectricity) and in development of accurate modeling strategies to bridge the gap between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds.

Selected publications

- Shu, Longlong; Ke, Shanming; Fei, Linfeng; Huang, Wenbin; Wang, Zhiguo; Gong, Jinhui; Jiang, Xiaoning; Wang, Li; Li, Fei; Lei, Shuijin; Rao, Zhenggang; Zhou, Yangbo; Zheng, Ren-Kui; Yao, Xi; Wang, Yu; Stengel, Massimiliano; Catalan, Gustau 2020, 'Photoflexoelectric effect in halide perovskites', Nature Materials, 19, 605–609.

- McGilly, Leo J.; Kerelsky, Alexander; Finney, Nathan R.; Shapovalov, Konstantin; Shih, En-Min; Ghiotto, Augusto; Zeng, Yihang; Moore, Samuel L.; Wu, Wenjing; Bai, Yusong; Watanabe, Kenji; Taniguchi, Takashi; Stengel, Massimiliano; Zhou, Lin; Hone, James; Zhu, Xiaoyang; Basov, Dmitri N.; Dean, Cory; Dreyer, Cyrus E.; Pasupathy, Abhay N. 2020, 'Visualization of moire superlattices', Nature Nanotechnology, 15, 580–584 .

- Brunin, Guillaume; Coutada Miranda, Henrique Pereira; Giantomassi, Matteo; Royo, Miquel; Stengel, Massimiliano; Verstraete, Matthieu J.; Gonze, Xavier; Rignanese, Gian-Marco; Hautier, Geoffroy 2020, 'Electron-Phonon beyond Frohlich: Dynamical Quadrupoles in Polar and Covalent Solids', Physical Review Letters, 125, 13, 136601.

- Brunin, Guillaume; Coutada Miranda, Henrique Pereira; Giantomassi, Matteo; Royo, Miquel; Stengel, Massimiliano; Verstraete, Matthieu J.; Gonze, Xavier; Rignanese, Gian-Marco; Hautier, Geoffroy 2020, 'Phonon-limited electron mobility in Si, GaAs, and GaP with exact treatment of dynamical quadrupoles', Physical Review B, 102, 9, 094308.

- Royo, Miquel; Hahn, Konstanze R.; Stengel, Massimiliano 2020, 'Using High Multipolar Orders to Reconstruct the Sound Velocity in Piezoelectrics from Lattice Dynamics', Physical Review Letters, 125, 21, 217602.

- Stefani C, Ponet L, Shapovalov K, Chen P, Langenberg E, Schlom DG, Artyukhin S, Stengel M, Domingo N & Catalan G 2020, 'Mechanical Softness of Ferroelectric 180° Domain Walls', Phys. Rev. X 10, 041001

Selected research activities

Invited talk: "Spatial dispersion effects via long-wave DFPT". Mini-2020 Total Energy Workshop, San Sebastián (Spain)