New States of Frustrated and Correlated Materials
Senior Investigators:
- Daniel Nocera (group co-leader), Chemistry
- Young Lee (group co-leader), Physics
- Shaoyan Chu, CMSE
- Eric Hudson, Physics
- Daniel Shim, EAPS
Research Goals:
Our group will focus on materials based on two-dimensional triangular and kagomé lattices, an area that we have pioneered as a small initiative during the previous funding cycle. The materials developed during the initiative period have attracted much interest and will serve as launching points for delving further in exciting new directions, such as probing exotic states of quantum matter that contain “topological order.” This new order leads to a host of fascinating properties, such as fractional quantum numbers, non-Abelian statistics, emergent photons, and more. Quantum spins on a kagomé lattice may exhibit this novel type of topological order which would have possible applications in quantum computing. The addition of mobile charge carriers into these systems may lead to unconventional superconductivity and non-Fermi liquid ground states. There is clearly much interesting territory to explore once candidate samples are synthesized. Our objective is to identify and synthesize new states of matter based on frustrated spin systems.
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Research Highlights:
New technique reveals nanoscale variations in “bulk” material properties
