Artificial Quantum Materials

What are quantum materials?

Quantum materials are solids where quantum mechanics governs the collective behavior of electrons in ways that cannot be understood from their individual properties alone. This includes phenomena like superconductivity, magnetism, and topological states that support dissipationless currents. Our focus is on creating artificial quantum materials: structures with electronic properties that do not exist in nature and cannot be produced by any chemical synthesis or crystal growth.

Approach

Conventional approaches like moiré stacking and cold atom lattices offer remarkable physics but face intrinsic limits in reproducibility, scalability, or tunability. The artificial lattices we build have no natural counterpart - no chemical synthesis or crystal growth can produce them. The only way to make them is to directly sculpt the potential landscape at the nanoscale. We do this by pushing nanofabrication to its absolute resolution frontier, using sub-20 nm periodic electron-beam lithography and thermal probe lithography on charge-transfer materials to write periodic potentials into van der Waals heterostructures and study the resulting quantum states with high fidelity.

Why it matters

Throughout history, new materials have shaped new technologies. From bronze tools to silicon electronics, each advance changed what was possible. Artificial quantum materials may play a similar role, offering electronic properties that nature does not, or can not, provide and enabling devices we have yet to imagine. Such capabilities could lead to ultra-efficient electronics that reduce energy use, sensors sensitive enough to detect signals from the human brain, or quantum components for secure communication. By designing these materials from the ground up, we explore both fundamental physics and the foundations for future technologies.

 

From fabrication to physics

We combine ultra-high-resolution patterning with a full characterization pipeline:

• Low-temperature quantum transport to reveal emergent phases.
• NanoARPES to directly map engineered band structures.
• Electron and scanning probe microscopy to link structure to function.

  This lets us close the loop from design to discovery, separating true many-body effects from sample-to-sample variability.                                                   

  Current focus areas

• Tunable flat bands and correlated phases in semiconductors.
• Topologically nontrivial domain boundaries.
• Charge-transfer superlattices based on halides such as α-RuCl₃.

Join us

We welcome BSc, MSc, PhD students, and postdocs who want to design, build, and explore quantum materials that have never existed before.