Congratulations to Professor Arthur Barnard for winning a 2026 National Science Foundation CAREER award. The award will support his work using novel scanning probes to study electronic correlations in 2D superconductors, electronic crystals, and fractional Chern insulators.
In the field of quantum materials, there are intensive efforts to understand complex forms of electronic order that arise at low temperatures, including emergent superconducting states, electronic crystals, and fractional Chern insulators (FCI). Layered materials, called van der Waals (vdW) materials are particularly accessible for realizing such new physics because their electronic states are easily tunable by electric fields and their band structures can be engineered by how layers are stacked on each other. Furthermore, since their electronic states are “at the surface”, inter-particle interactions can also be intentionally modified by controlling a material’s environment.
Arthur Barnard and his team in the Classical and Quantum Nanosystems lab at UW have developed and built a new measurement technique that uniquely enables them to study electronic order in quantum materials by controllably modifying how electrons interact with each other. The approach combines a homebuilt millikelvin scanning probe microscope with atomically flat 2D planar probes in order to tune electron-electron interactions in quantum materials while simultaneously performing magneto-transport measurements. In this NSF CAREER supported work, the team will study three distinct materials: magic angle twisted bilayer graphene, rhombohedral pentalayer graphene, and twisted molybdenum ditelluride with a goal of helping understand recently discovered forms of electronic order.