Condensed Matter Physics Seminar
Dr. Fazel Tafti
Boston College
Biography:
Fazel completed his PhD at the University of Toronto with Prof. Steven Julian. His thesis was focused on developing transport experiments under ultrahigh pressures in diamond anvil cells.
His first postdoc position at the University of Sherbrook was with Prof. Louis Taillefer. His research was focused on the thermal conductivity and thermoelectric measurements in iron-based superconductors.
He then changed fields from physics to chemistry and completed a second postdoc at Princeton University with Prof. Bob Cava. His research was focused on the chemical synthesis of topological and magnetic materials.
He has been an assistant professor at Boston College (physics department) since 2016. His lab is interdisciplinary between physics, chemistry, and materials science.
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“Design Principles for the Kitaev Magnets with Emergent Majorana Fermions”
Abstract: Our progress toward the age of quantum computing requires a new class of materials with long-range spin entanglement and fractionalized excitations known as Majorana fermions. These elusive particles are theoretically predicted to exist in a spin liquid ground state inside a frustrated magnet. Candidate materials for magnetic frustration and the spin liquid state must have strong interactions but lack any magnetic ordering. Instead of an ordered ground state, these materials produce a quantum entangled ground state with coherent spin fluctuations. In this talk, I will explain how such ground states are constructed in magnetic materials by introducing valence bond solids and resonating valence bonds. I will focus on a special class of materials with honeycomb structure and strong magnetic frustration due to bond dependent ferromagnetic interactions. Such materials are described by a Kitaev Hamiltonian that consists of bond dependent anisotropic exchange interactions. I will explain why the current candidate materials have failed to satisfy the predictions of the theory, and provide a potential solution to improve such materials and achieve a true spin liquid ground state.
Wednesday December 4, 2019
2:00 PM
Gant South Building, Room GS-117
For more information, contact: Anna Huang at anna.huang@uconn.edu