University of Arkansas Physicist Awarded $300,000 to Study Quantum Materials

Photo by University Relations

Jak Chakhalian, University of Arkansas

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Jak Chakhalian, a professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, has been awarded a $300,000 grant to visualize and control emergent phases in quantum materials.

Chakhalian’s award, spread over three years, is part of an overall $2.9 million grant awarded from the U.S. Department of Energy to five universities and two national laboratories. Pennsylvania State University will lead the project, which includes scientists at Columbia and Drexel universities, the University of California at San Diego and Argonne and Brookhaven national laboratories.

Chakhalian will oversee the growth of the quantum materials – specifically correlated transition metal oxides – that will be used for the project in the Laboratory for Artificial Quantum Materials at the U of A. Chakhalian is the lab’s director.

Quantum materials are substances in which the collective behavior of electrons leads to many emergent properties, such as high-temperature superconductivity and exotic forms of magnetism. New discoveries in this field could eventually lead to revolutionary applications in electronics, computing, catalysis and energy technology.

“There are many, many interesting properties of these materials that we can’t visualize with conventional tools such as temperature and magnetic fields,” Chakhalian said. “We’ll be using these ultrafast lasers that will knock them out of their equilibrium, then let them relax and we will visualize their phases. The Holy Grail is to uncover new or hidden phases of matter that occur when they are out of their equilibrium, and control those phases to achieve, for example, room-temperature superconductivity.”

The ultrafast pulses of light the team will be using move in femtoseconds, which are equal to one millionth of one billionth of a second.

“In the last two years, when we have taken these quantum materials and ‘poked’ them with an ultrafast laser, there is a growing body of evidence that they don’t return to their previous equilibrium form. The resulting material – when it comes down to its meta-equilibrium – might be entirely different.”

Chakhalian holds the Charles E. and Clydene Scharlau Endowed Professorship in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. He was recently selected as an investigator by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which is developing a $1.8 million grant to support Chakhalian’s research.

The Moore Experimental Investigators in Quantum Materials program awarded a total of $34.2 million to 19 scientists at 11 universities across the United States, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.