3:00–4:00 pm
KPTC 206 5720 S Ellis Ave
Probing emergent phenomena in materials using quantum sensors
Interactions between particles in a many-body quantumsystem can lead to emergent collective phenomena. This isparticularly evident in the solid state, where electrons in asolid can exhibit a wide variety of collective properties, frommagnetism to superconductivity, depending on thestructure and chemistry of their host material. The newestfrontier in this landscape involves emergent phenomena in materials — charge-neutralfermionic excitations, spin-charge separation, and quantum criticality in metals, amongothers — that challenge our existing frameworks of many-body quantum physics.Experimentally testing the evolving theories in this frontier requires advancements in boththe design of the host materials, and the development of new techniques to probe theiremergent physics. I will describe how synthetic techniques can be used to tune theinteractions, symmetries, and dimensionality governing the electrons in a material torealize desired emergent phenomena, and how quantum sensors can be leveraged as aunique nanoscale probe of these systems. In particular, I will describe an example in whichwe use the coherence properties of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to detectsignatures of an interaction-driven hydrodynamic spin mode in an atomically-thin magneticinsulator. The integration of materials synthesis and quantum sensing techniques has thepotential to not only shed new light on existing problems like hightemperaturesuperconductivity, but also to raise new questionsabout how many-body quantum systems can be used to store,process, and transmit the quantum information generated by thequantum sensor.
Speaker: Dr. Nikola Maksimovic, Harvard University
Host: Prof. Philippe Guyot-Sionnest, Dept. of Physics (pgs@uchicago.edu)