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Associate Professor of Physics

Early in our careers we learn that electrons are antisocial 鈥� they never want to be in the same place at the same time, and their mutual interactions can often be ignored, especially when considering just a few (or a few hundred). But as you crowd more and more into the same space, electrons begin to talk to one another; in solid materials, they sometimes decide to spontaneously organize, condense, and rearrange themselves鈥攃ollectively assembling into patterns and phases that we never would have predicted from a 鈥渙ne-electron鈥� picture.

Our lab studies the properties and applications of these quantum materials, where the tremendous number (10²³) of electrons, and their collective interactions, leads to new and fascinating behavior. These electronic states of matter can have familiar classical analogs鈥攏oninteracting gas, strongly interacting 鈥淔ermi鈥� liquid, or crystalline solid鈥攂ut they can also be fundamentally quantum-mechanical states that have no classical analog. We investigate these exotic states of matter鈥攕uperconductors, spin-liquid magnets, charge-ordered oxides, and amorphous Anderson insulators鈥攗sing hands-on low-temperature experiments with thin film and bulk crystal samples. Since thermal energy can disrupt fragile quantum states, we cool the samples to temperatures below 1 kelvin, and examine how their electrons respond to intense electromagnetic fields.

Research

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