Author of more than 680 articles in refereed journals and books, 37 invited review articles, 34 invited presentations at national and international conferences, and 34 patents. Some papers may be found on the digital commons: Digital Commons Page

Surface Science

Graduate Students and Postdocs

Biographical Summary

2002 - present: Charles Bessey Professor, University of Nebraska
1995 - present: Professor of Physics and Graduate Fellow, University of Nebraska
1994 - present: Research Professor of Chemistry, University of Nebraska
1993 - 1995: Associate Prof. of Physics and Graduate Fellow, University of Nebraska
1990 - 1993: Associate Prof. of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
1987 - 1996: Adjunct Prof. of Chemistry, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
1986 - 1993: Member of Solid State Science and Technology Program, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
1984 - 1990: Assistant Prof. of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
1981 - 1983: Scientist with the Fritz-Haber Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, FRG
1981 - Visiting Scientist to the Department of Physics, University Osnabrueck, FRG
1980 - 1981: Research Assistant to Dr. M. Grunze, Fritz-Haber Institut der Max-Planck Gesellschaft, and the Free University, Berlin, FRG

Interests and Capabilities

The major focus of the Dowben group emphasizes the changes in electronic (band) structure across electronic phase transitions in reduced dimensionality and multiferroic coupling. Of interest are ferromagnetism in local moment systems or spatially restricted systems, ferroelectricity, multiferroic behavior, deterministic changes of spin state in molecular systems, and the nonmetal to metal transition.

Specific techniques include angle-resolved photoemission, resonant photoemission, inverse photoemission and spin polarized inverse photoemission. Other techniques include spin polarized photoemission, x-ray magnetic circular dichroism, x-ray absorptions, characteristic energy loss, low energy electron diffraction, angle resolved thermal desorption spectroscopy, X-ray photoemission, and magneto-optic Kerr effect.

Research Projects

1. Organic and organometallic materials in ultrahigh vacuum molecular multiferroics
2. Orientation, bonding and electronic structure of organic overlayers, organometallic molecular overlayers and molecular magnets.
3. The temperature dependent electronic structure of ferroelectric crystalline molecular films, as a function of metallicity.
4. The spin polarized occupied and unoccupied band structure of local moment ferromagnetic systems as a function of temperature.

Funded by the NSF

Research

Group Personnel

• Takashi Komesu
• Arjun Subedi
• Peace Adegbite
• Md. Zaid Zaz
• Gauthami Viswan

Collaborators at UNL

• Kirill Belashchenko (Physics)
• Christian Binek (Physics)
• Alexei Gruverman (Physics)
• Xia Hong (Physics)
• Rebecca Lai (Chemistry)
• Wai-Ning Mei (Physics)
• Alexander Sinitskii (Chemistry)
• Robert Streubel (Physics)
• Evgeny Tsymbal (Physics)
• Xiaoshan Xu (Physics)

Recent Results and Key References

Electrostatic Dipolar Coupling on the Local Scale:

Aaron Mosey, Ashley S. Dale, Guanhua Hao, Alpha N'Diaye, Peter A. Dowben, Ruihua Cheng, "Quantitative Study of Energy Change in Voltage-controlled Spin Crossover Molecules for Molecular Spintronics", J. Physical Chemistry Letters 11 (2020) 8231-8237

Guanhua Hao, Aaron Mosey, Xuanyuan Jiang, Andrew J. Yost, Keshab R. Sapkota, George T. Wang, Xin Zhang, Jian Zhang, Alpha T. N'Diaye, Ruihua Cheng, Xiaoshan Xu, Peter A. Dowben, "Nonvolatile Voltage Controlled Molecular Spin State Switching", Appl. Phys. Lett. 114 (2019) 032901; doi: 10.1063/1.5054909

Xin Zhang, Alpha T. N'Diaye, Xuanyuan Jiang, Xiaozhe Zhang, Yuewei Yin, Xuegang Chen, Xia Hong, Xiaoshan Xu, Peter A. Dowben, "Indications of magnetic coupling effects in spin cross-over molecular thin films", Chem. Commun. 54 (2018) 944-947.

Xin Zhang, Paulo S. Costa, James Hooper, Daniel P. Miller, Alpha T. N'Diaye, Sumit Beniwal, Xuanyuan Jiang, Yuewei Yin, Patrick Rosa, Lucie Routaboul, Mathieu Gonidec, Lorenzo Poggini, Pierre Braunstein, Bernard Doudin, Xiaoshan Xu, Axel Enders, Eva Zurek, Peter A. Dowben, "Locking and Unlocking the Molecular Spin Cross-Over Transition", Advanced Materials 32 (2017) 1702257.

Recent General Papers on Surface & Interface Magnetism:

Ather Mahmood, Will Echtenkamp, Mike Street, Jun-Lei Wang, Shi Cao, Takashi Komesu, Peter A. Dowben, Pratyush Buragohain, Haidong Lu, Alexei Gruverman, Arun Parthasaraty, Shaloo Rakheja, Christian Binek, "Voltage controlled Neel vector rotation in zero magnetic field at CMOS-compatible temperatures". Nature Communications 12 (2021) 1674

Peter A. Dowben, Christian Binek, Kai Zhang, Lu Wang, Wai-Ning Mei, Jonathan P. Bird, Uttam Singisetti, Xia Hong, Kang L. Wang, Dmitri Nikonov, "Towards a Strong Spin-Orbit Coupling Magnetoelectric Transistor", IEEE Journal of Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits 4 (2018) 1-9; Online ISSN: 2329-9231; doi: 10.1109/JXCDC.2018.2809640