$5M Grant Awarded to IPAM Participants

Posted on 11/30/21 in News

The Simons Foundation has awarded a $5M Target Grant for the project “Moiré Materials Magic” to Alan MacDonald, Eric Cances, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Efthimios Kaxiras, Lin Lin, Mitchell Luskin, Angel Rubio, and Maciej Zworski. According to Mitch Luskin, the project was hatched “at lunch during the IPAM Workshop for 2D Materials” in January 2020.  Several of the PIs of the grant participated in that workshop, and many have participated in multiple recent IPAM events.  

The project centers on unusual physical properties realized when 2D crystals with a small difference in lattice constant or orientation are overlaid, resulting in a moiré pattern.  If the two-dimensional crystals are semiconductors or semimetals, the resulting material is described by effective quantum models that have the much larger periodicity of the moiré pattern. Such moiré materials may potentially realize new fundamental physics as well as find valuable applications.  

Please see the Simons Foundation announcement for more details.