Dr Jorge Íñiguez-González, Head of the Modeling of Functional Materials group at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), has been awarded a highly competitive European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for his project on a new class of artificial materials whose properties can be dynamically reconfigured on demand.
The five-year project will receive close to €2.5 million in funding and is expected to start in early 2027. ERC Advanced Grants are among Europe's most prestigious research awards that support established scientists with a track record of significant achievements to pursue ambitious, high-risk, high-gain research.
A new way of creating materials
The project builds on groundbreaking work published in Nature in 2024 , in which Íñiguez-González and colleagues helped establish a new approach to designing materials by stacking ultra-thin crystalline oxide layers at carefully controlled angles. The resulting structures belong to an emerging field known as "twistronics", where a simple change in the angle between layers can dramatically alter a material's behaviour.
While researchers worldwide are beginning to explore the possibilities offered by these twisted materials, the ERC-funded project aims to take the concept a step further.
"Today, these materials are generally created with a fixed twist angle that remains unchanged," explains Jorge Íñiguez-González. “Our ambition is to investigate whether we can actively control that angle and reconfigure the material whenever we want, using very little energy. If successful, it would allow us to dynamically programme a material's properties instead of being locked into a single configuration.”
Towards adaptive and energy-efficient technologies
Changing the twist angle could alter a wide range of material properties, including electrical, optical and magnetic responses. Such adaptability could eventually open new possibilities for information storage, sensing technologies and next-generation computing architectures that consume far less energy than today's systems.
The project will focus on ferroelectric oxides, a family of highly responsive materials that react strongly to external stimuli such as electric fields, temperature changes or mechanical stress. Their exceptional sensitivity makes them promising candidates for creating reconfigurable systems that can be controlled at very low energy cost.
Theory at the forefront of discovery
Unlike many materials projects that rely primarily on experimental work, the ERC project will be driven by advanced modelling and simulation. Because the structures involved are only a few nanometres thick and extremely challenging to characterize experimentally, computational approaches play a crucial role in understanding their behaviour and testing new concepts before they can be realized in the laboratory.
The research will be led by Jorge Íñiguez-González and will also involve Hugo Aramberri and Natalya Fedorova, senior members of his research group at LIST.
"This project is about much more than discovering new physical phenomena," says Jorge Íñiguez-González. “It is about creating a completely new platform for designing materials whose functions can be adjusted when needed. We are only beginning to understand the possibilities that these systems may offer.”