A public outreach talk on the most accurate images taken of the internal life of quantum matter
Following our established tradition, we have organised a public lecture within our international conference series “Condensed Matter Physics in the City”. This June, our talk featured Prof. Ali Yazdani from the University of Princeton. Ali Yazdani is the co-Director of the Quantum Initiative at Princeton University, and he shared his insights about “The secret life of electrons”.
The talk was delivered in a packed auditorium at Imperial College London, drawing an audience of 130 attendees from across the general public, regional undergraduate students and including international conference attendees. Ali spoke about the challenges, the science and the technological potential of quantum materials. He is well known for his work on high temperature superconductors, topological insulators and the hunt for the mysterious Majorana fermion.
Prof Yazdani’s work is at the forefront of condensed matter physics, and he shared his latest understanding of quantum materials such as twisted graphene multilayers. We learned how these materials provide unprecedented control and ability to manipulate electronic matter, which may lead to new quantum technologies.
Prof Yazdani’s research group’s focus is to harness the power of high-resolution scanning quantum microscopy techniques to understand such novel phases of matter. These studies have provided information that is impossible to obtain using conventional macroscopic averaging techniques typically used in condensed matter physics. For example, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) techniques can directly visualize electronic wavefunctions in quantum materials, allowing us to understand the nature of new quantum phases and their excitations.
The talk stimulated a lively discussion and numerous members of the audience showered our speaker with questions for more than an hour following his presentation.