Research Interests

I am a PhD student researcher and Endowed Engineering Fellow in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Brown University.

In the Atomic Scale Quantum Materials Lab at Brown, we grow materials (mostly oxide perovskites) whose microscopic quantum properties result in large-scale effects that can be measured and harnessed for myrad applications spanning computation, sensing, cryptography, and more. My specific interests include ferroelectric materials, multiferroic phase change nucleation and growth dynamics, and applications in next-generation computation such as compute-in-memory and analog computation

February 12, 2026

I am now diving fully into my personal research project, in which I hope to directly image phonon-mediated domain wall motion in BFO using our ultrafast pulser and PFM setup. The first step in the project is to get my hands on the right sample. In our previous work we have been relying on a "magic" sample grown in the Ramesh group at UC Berkeley way back in the day. I decided it was time to finally roll up my sleeves and figure out how to replicate this sample in the Caretta Lab. I had sucess quite quickly, likely becasue I had already put a lot of time into optimizing our BFO recipe over the summer. After a breakthrough tweak to our chamber geometry (shorter target-substrate distance) I was able to grow a beautiful BFO film with 71 degree domains and no conducting bottom electrode (which is key for our lateral measurment approach). Below I have pictured the overlayed height and amplitude data from a PFM scan of the sample. The height data shows the topography of the film (the steps are ~1 atom high!), while the amplitude data shows the local polarization. I am excited to get some devices down on this sample and get some new images!

Overlay of height and amplitude data from a PFM scan of newly deposited epitaxial BFO.

December 6, 2025

This past week was the MRS Fall 2025 Meeting in Boston, MA, where I presented my first ever oral presentation at a major conference. My talk covered the work I have been doing creating an experimental setup where we measure ultrafast qusi-dynamics by pairing the high voltage fast pulser we put together at MIT with piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM). The talk was well received, I had many great questions and conversation after the fact. I look forward to developing this project into a full paper next semester and potentially collaborating with some other groups who I made contact with at the meeting.

Coherent motion of a single FE domain wall via our ultrafast quasi-dynamic imaging method.

August 28, 2025

For the past couple weeks I have been taking trips to MIT to work with our collaborator David Bono at his electronics workshop to develop a custom ultrafast, high voltage pulse generator. By making use of transistors that operate in avalanche breakdown mode to switch a charged line on and off, we are able to generate ~170V pulses with a rising edge of ~750ps. Once we source the necessary power supply back in our lab at Brown, I will begin experiments using the pulse generator to push ferroelecric domain walls laterally in our BFO thin film samples. Previous experiments used a 50V version of this circuit, and because of lithography constraints, I believe we had insufficient electric field to demonstrate coherent domain wall motion. With this new circuit, I am hopeful we will be able to see more consistent and reliable motion of a single domain wall, which will eneble a lot of really fun physiscs exploration.

The electronics lab at MIT.

August 15, 2025

This summer I have been working on developing a BFO recipe for our lab. I have been growing BFO films via Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) on SrTiO3 substrates, and have been working on optimizing the growth conditions to achieve high-quality films with the desired phase (measured via X-ray diffraction) and surface morphology (measured via Atomic Force Microscopy). Though this is my first hands-on growth project, I have picked it up quickly and already have had the pleasure of teaching our new PhD student and postdoc the ropes of the PLD sytem. We are getting quite close to a good baseline recipe, our current best films show great XRD peaks with fringing, and the expected surface morphology (pictured below).

In other news, my abstract for the MRS Fall 2025 Meeting was accepted, and I will be giving an oral presentation on my work on domain wall dynamics in BFO (more info to come on that soon). This will be my first major talk, I'm quite excited to start the communication and outreach part of my career :)

AFM morphology of BFO grown in the Caretta Lab.