News: Faculty

The Nagel group introduced a new class of pluripotent metamaterials: trainable liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) metamaterials with a surprisingly beneficial trait—the ability to forget. Their article in PNAS describes how, after training LCE arrays to exhibit one behavior, their team was then able to “reset” the material using heat, so it could be retrained for different behaviors.

Zoe Yan received a 2025 Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for her exceptional ability and promise in basic research.

Arvind Murugan was named a 2025 Schmidt Polymath to acknowledge and support his novel research.

The Jerison & Dinner groups have developed a new tool for the identification and discovery of different types of dynamical behavior in a range of complex systems. In their recent publication in PRX Life, they train neural networks to infer the topology of dynamical flows from trajectory data by using contrastive learning on coordinate-invariant representations.

Dmitri Talapin received the ACS Award in Colloid Chemistry in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field.

The Vaikuntanathan group found that biophysical systems have intrinsic limitations on their information processing power and explained how these limitations are overcome. Their article in Nature Communications uses tools from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to demonstrate both the intrinsic limitations and how input multiplicity—behaviors such as the ability of enzymes to interact with multiple targets—can overcome them.

In response to a series of puzzling observations of light-induced "superconductivity" discovered by A. Cavalleri, the Levin group showed that the materials in which he found this phenomenon all seem to be strongly paired superconductors but in their normal state (above Tc). Their article in npj Quantum Materials explains his experiments by discussing how radiation exposure causes the preformed pairs in these materials to become more plentiful as the damaging fermions are excited away. The light creates a new state of matter, showing diamagnetic signatures without true superconducting long-range order.

The Alivisatos & Engel groups introduced a mechanism for the efficient up-conversion observed in CsPbBr₃ lead halide perovskite nanocrystals. Their paper in Nature Communications discusses how they used photoluminescence measurements to reveal that the up-conversion is mediated by the Pb-Br-Pb bending phonon mode (~7 meV) and involves unexpected coherent lattice motion synchronized with exciton-polaron formation.

Joshua Wagner, a graduate student with the Steve Sibener Group, has been named the recipient of the distinguished Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Award from the AVS (American Vacuum Society). 

Michelle Brann has received the 2025 ACS Astrochemistry Dissertation Award in recognition for the significant contributions made during her doctoral studies with Prof. Steven J. Sibener.

Sid Nagel was interviewed by Quanta Magazine on the physics of "ordinary" phenomena.

Margaret Gardel & Peter Littlewood have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences

Vincenzo Vitelli was named a CNRS Fellow-Ambassador, which invites leading researchers to visit and mentor with French laboratories.