CNAM and JQI Members on Team Awarded $33M Australian Prize

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has just announced $283.5M in funding for nine ARC Centres of Excellence, including the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low Energy Electronics Technologies. The team, which includes Prof. Johnpierre Paglione of CNAM and Profs. Victor Galitski, William Phillips and Dr. Ian Spielman of the Joint Quantum Institute, will be led by former CNAM Director Michael Fuhrer and established at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The Centre will develop the scientific foundation and intellectual property for new electronics technologies to decrease energy consumption by realising fundamentally new types of electronic conduction. More information can be found in the media release.

CNAM Affiliate Leite Awarded APS Ovshinsky Fellowship

Professor Marina Leite has been selected to receive this year's Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship from the American Physical Society. The Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship was established in 2013 to recognize and provide funding for promising research aimed at energy sustainability. It aims to stimulate and support the incubation stage of highly creative and innovative ideas of young scientists working on the problems of energy sustainability. The Ovshinsky Fellowship consists of $15,000, given to the awardee’s institution by the American Physical Society for the purpose of the recipient’s energy sustainability research. As part of the Fellowship, Professor Leite will give an invited talk at the upcoming American Physical Society Meeting in March or April of 2017.

Visit the American Physical Society website for more information.

Proximity Effect Realized in Topological Kondo Insulator

Superconductivity in the topologically protected surface states of a three-dimensional topological insulator has been predicted to be a promising platform for exploring exotic quantum states such as Majorana fermion excitations. Although previous efforts have focused on the superconducting proximity effect in bilayer structures between a superconductor and a chalcogenide topological insulator, suppressing the conducting bulk contribution and securing high interfacial transparency between a superconductor and a topological insulator have been major experimental bottlenecks to demonstrating induced superconductivity. CNAM researchers led by Prof. Ichiro Takeuchi, in collaboration with Profs. Richard Greene and Johnpierre Paglione, have now demonstrated a supercurrent to flow through the surface layers of the topological Kondo insulator material samarium hexaboride (SmB₆) via in situ deposition of a superconducting layer on SmB₆ thin films. Published in Physical Review X, this study provides a unique insight into the surface state of SmB₆, and marks an important stepping stone for pursuing novel quantum phenomena using thin-film topological insulator devices.

New CNAM Director Appointed

Prof. Johnpierre Paglione has been appointed as the new Director of the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials.  Having contributed to several fields of condensed matter research through both single-crystal synthesis of superconducting, quantum-critical and topological materials, as well as exploration of novel phenomena, Prof. Paglione will continue to ensure the strength and vitality of the experimental condensed matter physics research performed in the Center. Paglione is a leader in the field of quantum criticality and has made important contributions to the fields of heavy-fermion materials and the quasiparticle picture of correlated materials. His team has more recently pursued several new areas of research including iron-based high-temperature superconductivity and topological insulators and superconductors. He is the recipient of a National Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Early Career Award from the Department of Energy, and a recipient of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Materials Synthesis Award. Dr. Paglione earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in Canada.