Today's Discoveries, Tomorrow's Technology
We lay fundamental scientific groundwork that will be essential for determining whether quantum materials’ remarkable properties could form the technological basis for future generations of faster and more powerful information technologies and devices.
Recent News
Mitch DiPasquale receives Thode Postdoc Fellowship
Evan Smith receives APS Outstanding Dissertation Award
Bo Yuan receives NSERC Postdoc Fellowship
Making Fundamental Discoveries, from Crystal Growth to Characterization
Our research group makes fundamental discoveries in quantum materials – materials whose unique properties arise from their exotic quantum properties, often involving quantum magnetism, superconductivity, and topology. The mysteries of quantum materials are fertile ground for Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries. Many of these materials have remarkable properties that could form the technological basis for major breakthroughs in information technology—if the unique properties of quantum materials can be better understood and then harnessed. Such breakthroughs that could be based on superconducting electronics, spintronics, and quantum computing, for example.
To achieve such understanding, our team determines elementary excitations and structure-property relationships in new, mostly magnetic, materials. We make crystals of new materials that we predict will have exotic ground states and take them to forefront neutron and x-ray scattering facilities around the world to characterize them. We often collaborate with leading theorists to interpret the experiments and thereby shed light on the exotic properties of the new materials.
How do we generate materials which exhibit exotic ground states? We incorporate features into the crystal structure and the nature of the magnetic moments which encourage fluctuations, and thereby make it difficult for the material to find an ordered state at low temperatures. We have three features we can work with: (1) we make crystal architectures that are likely to show geometrical frustration; (2) we make magnetic crystals that have quantum magnetic moments in them, especially s=1/2 magnetic moments; and (3) we make three dimensional crystals that are made up of an assembly of low dimensional substructures, like stacks of quasi-two-dimensional planes of atoms.
World-leading research
Our Research Themes
Our group conducts world-leading research the following materials.
Geometrically frustrated magnets:
These are magnetic materials which possess local geometries and magnetic interactions whose combination is incompatible with long range order. The easiest to appreciate occurrence of geometrical frustration happens with the combination of antiferromagnetism and triangular geometries. The tetrahedron is to three dimensions what the triangle is to two dimensions, so this is a common, but poorly understood occurance in three dimensional crystal structures made up of networks of interconnected tetrahedra.
Quantum Magnets with singlet ground states
These are magnetic materials comprised of s=1/2 quantum magnetic moments decorating various lattices. One interesting and basic result of quantum mechanics is that while the classical picture of ferromagnetism corresponding to all spins in a solid pointing in the same direction is also valid when quantum mechanics is taken into account, the classical Neel state for antiferromagnetism is not correct when a fully quantum treatment of antiferromagnetism is necessary.
High temperature superconductors
Actually high temperature superconductors are also quantum magnets – doped quantum magnets, decorating a low dimensional structure, a two dimensional one in this case. So these materials combine a couple of the general themes we are interested in.
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