Everything around us is built from materials, and the properties of those materials determine what technologies are possible. Our group focuses on a special class of materials that can be broken down into atomically thin layers using little more than adhesive tape. When matter shrinks down to these extreme dimensions, quantum mechanical effects take over and entirely new behaviors emerge, behaviors that don’t exist in the bulk material and that could power the next generation of electronics.

You may have heard of graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon that sparked a Nobel Prize and decades of excitement. It turns out graphene is just one of thousands of known materials that can be isolated this way, spanning a remarkable range of electronic properties: metals, insulators, magnets, and more exotic states in between. Most of these remain largely unexplored.

We isolate these materials, study their quantum properties using low-temperature and high-frequency tools, and stack them together like LEGO bricks to engineer entirely new structures with properties tailored for specific applications. The combinations are virtually limitless.