Issue 1, 2014
Our congratulations go to Nordita Professor Alexander Balatsky and his collaborators at KTH Royal Insitute of Technology, Uppsala University, and Chalmers University of Technology, who have been awarded a major grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW) to fund a five-year research project on Functional Dirac Materials starting in July 2013. The total grant of 32 million SEK will go towards both theoretical and experimental work at the participating institutions.
Presentation (in Swedish) of the project on the KTH web site.
The project aims to achieve new functionalities by design of nanostructures, films and interfaces of Dirac Materials. The project is of basic scientific nature.
It involves novel concepts that will elucidate our understanding of Dirac Materials and their functionalization. The outcome of the proposed research may have technological implications; for instance, understanding the nature of high-Tc superconductivity may lead to materials with higher transition temperatures; the spin oriented edge states may find use in spintronics, and the prevented scattering of edge states may increase the coherence times of q-bits. At the same time there might also be effects leading to standards with higher precision - the quantum Hall effect is one example.
Research on manipulation of Dirac nodes in topological insulators (TI) will yield new states of matter like TI excitons and spin pumping of TI. The demonstration of the predicted effects and novel concepts requires processing of superconducting structures that are smaller than the state-of-the-art today, depositing topological insulators of higher quality, further improving electron structure characterization, using new spin transfer torque configurations, and further development of modeling.
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