SCOTT RUSSEL WAITUKAITIS

Scott Russel Waitukaitis, assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, where he runs the Soft and Electrified Materials Lab (SEML). Specialized in complex phenomena that emerge when everyday materials interact with electric fields.

Role in the LeidenForce project

• [academic partner]   institute of science and technology austria • austria 🇦🇹 • 🇺🇸
• [principal investigator]   dc#3 • tomas cerda

Biography

Scott Waitukaitis was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics (honors) from the University of Arizona. He then earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago, where he was a Robert Millikan Fellow and the inaugural recipient of the Bruce Winstein Prize for Instrumentation, as well as a winner of the Springer Thesis Award.

He did his postdoctoral work on mechanical metamaterials at Leiden University and AMOLF in the Netherlands. During this time he was the winner of the Fysica Young Speaker's Award, the Aspen Center Block Prize, and a Veni grant from the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research.

In 2019 he became Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, where he runs the Soft and Electrified Materials Lab.

Currently the group's major efforts revolve around unsolved problems at the interface of electrostatics and mechanics, e.g. why the act of physical contact causes materials to exchange electrical charge. The group is generously funded by the ERC and FWF.

Lab

The Soft and Electrified Materials Lab (SEML) focuses on complex phenomena that emerge when everyday materials interact with electric fields. One major focus is contact electrification of insulators, i.e. the exchange of electrical charge between materials when they touch. Although known to occur even in ancient Greece, the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood.

In our lab, we have found that contact electrification seems to have different causes depending on the type of material used.

For soft organic materials such as plastics, our work points to irreversible nanoscale mechanical deformations as a key ingredient, potentially through the release of charge through mechanochemical and flexoelectric effects.

For oxide insulators, i.e., hard inorganic materials like glass or ceramic, we find that surface adsorbates (e.g. nanoscopic layers of water and other molecules) play a critical role.

Other interests of the group include creating emergent activity with electrical energy injection (e.g. Quincke rollers or charged matter in acoustic levitation), the physics of lightning, the development of charge-measurement techniques, and the Leidenfrost effect.

Affiliation & links

Soft Electrified Materials Lab (SEML)