What happens when millions of electrons are crammed into a material with the thickness of a single atom? This question turns out to be one of the most complex that humans have ever dared to ask, and for decades theorists and experimentalists have been challenged to answer it. But how do we probe these tiny materials?

In our group, we develop new ways to measure the rich physics of low-dimensional materials like atomically-thin sheets and nanometer-wide nanotubes, and use these insights to develop new devices with novel functionality. We focus particularly on energy: how it flows through materials and what that tells us about emergent states of matter.

Why is energy so interesting? You may be reading this from a laptop computer. Have you ever felt it get hot to the touch? All of that heat comes from billions of nanoscale transistors, flipping states in fractions of a nanosecond. Our computer processors can get so hot that they need to be throttled, or operated at a lower frequency, to keep them from being damaged and to maintain performance. So we lose in two ways: we lose energy in the form of waste heat, and we lose on performance, processing overhead, and the device engineering we need to keep things cool.

What if we could make devices that operated without generating so much waste heat? And what if we could collect the energy built into that heat and keep it from going to waste?

Using new tools, we will explore the world of low-dimensional materials to learn how they can help us answer these questions. Along the way, we will delve deeply into the worlds of interacting electrons, where exotic phenomena outside of our everyday experience take hold. Want to join us on this journey? Follow the links above to contact the PI and learn more.