In 1990, a seminar was initiated for QMC (formerly CNAM/CSR) graduate students in order to present their research to the other students, postdocs, and faculty in the Center. In addition to fostering a rich, collaborative environment in which students learn about the breadth and scope of research being done in QMC, the idea of this series is to teach several crucial skills to our students:
1) How to present their research in a clear and time-efficient way to an audience that was not expert in their area of research;
2) How to best answer questions during their presentations;
3) How to ask good questions when in an audience (or interview), in particular about research beyond their own narrow PhD topic.
In this seminar, students submit formalized feedback to each weekly presenter, providing informative information about presentation style, research content and tips for improvement.
Best Speaker Awards
At the end of each term, a cash prize award is given for the best student and postdoc presentations based on class feedback scores. Previous winners are listed here:
2025 (spring) Jarryd Horn (student)
2024 (fall) Jared Erb (student)
2023 (fall) Jared Erb (student), Peter Czajka (postdoc)
2022 (fall) Sungha Baek (student), Keenan Avers (postdoc)
2020 (fall) Shukai Ma
2019 (spring) Rui Zhang (student), Tarapada Sarkar (postdoc)
2018 (fall) Chris Eckberg (student), Jen-Hao Yeh (postdoc)
2015 Paul Syers, Jasper Drisko
2014 Sean Fackler, Paul Syers,
2013 Kevin Kirshenbaum, Kirsten Burson
2012 Baladitya Suri, Kristen Burson
2011 (fall) Sergii Pershoguba, Ted Thorbeck
2011 (spring) Anirban Gangopadhyay, Baladitya Suri
2010 (fall) Christian J. Long, Tomasz M. Kott
2010 (spring) Tomasz M. Kott, Kevin Kirshenbaum
2009 (fall) Arun Luykx, Jen-Hao Yeh
Title: Magnetic properties of candidate Weylsemimetals Ln3TiBi5
Abstract: Topological semimetals (TSMs)are a class of gapless quantum materials exhibiting protected band crossing in the bulk band structure and vanished density of states near the Fermi energy. The most common TSMs are Dirac semimetals (DSMs) and Weyl semimetals (WSMs)with corresponding Dirac and Weyl points, where the Dirac point is 4-fold degenerate, while the Weyl point is 2-fold degenerate. The breaking of either inversion symmetry or time-reversal symmetry in DSMs results in
WSMs. In 2020, Klemenz et al. proposed simple chemical rules as a powerful tool for predicting TSMs [1]. They proposed two requirements to be a TSM: 1) two chemically equivalent atoms per unit cell; 2) extended hypervalent bonds. The former enables band folding, which brings about band inversion and thereby causes band crossing, a primary source for a topological phase. Extended hypervalent bonds are electron-rich, multicenter chemical bonding where electrons delocalize over a structural motif. These hypervalent bonds can both stabilize the topological band structure and make the material more robust to defects that would otherwise cause dispersed bands. In this work, I will discuss materials Ln3TiBi5 (Ln = Pr, Nd, Gd) that fit these two requirements and thus are good candidates for WSMs. We performed single crystal growth, as well as studies to investigate the magnetic and heat capacity properties of these compounds.
[1] Klemenz, S. et al. (2020)“The Role of Delocalized Chemical Bonding in Square-Net-Based Topological Semimetals,” Journal of the American Chemical Society, 142(13), pp.6350–6359. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.0c01227.