Prof. Kai Liu’s work featured in two top journals

Posted in News Story

Recent publications from Prof. Kai Liu’s group have been featured in a journal cover of ACS Nano and a frontispiece of Advanced Functional Materials, respectively.

In a study led by graduate student Willie Beeson, Prof. Kai Liu and Prof. Gen Yin’s groups demonstrate that non-magnetic aluminum provides a sensitive handle to switch the magnetic order in high entropy FeCoNiMnAlₓ films. This is illustrated by the transformation of the crystal lattice of FeCoNiMn from face-centered-cubic (fcc) to body-centered-cubic (bcc), flipped by an aluminum “twister”, accompanied by the switching of Mn order from antiferromagnetic to ferromagnetic. This design, created by Audrey Liu, Erin Marlowe, Zihui Zeng, Zhijie Chen, and Willie Beeson, was published in the August 28, 2025 issue of Advanced Functional Materials as a Frontispiece. This work has led to invited talks at the recent Trends in Magnetism Conference in Bari, Italy, and the upcoming 2025 Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials.

In another study led by postdoctoral fellow Dhritiman Bhattacharya and graduate students Colin Langton and Bradley Fugetta, together with Dr. Peter Fischer’s group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Prof. Liu’s team demonstrate a novel curvature induced magnetic effect. Their results provide direct experimental evidence that curvature can induce a “handedness,” or chirality, in magnetic patterns. The illustration, designed by Colin Langton and Erin Marlowe, shows X-ray nanotomography of a curved thin film with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy deposited over nanowire networks, revealing curvature-induced modifications in the magnetic configuration. It was featured as a Journal Cover of the September 9, 2025 issue of ACS Nano. This work illustrates the potential to use curvature as a new design parameter to tailor spin textures and energetic landscapes at the nanoscale. It will be presented as an invited talk at the upcoming 2026 APS Global Physics Summit.