Department: Physics
Adivsor: Matthew Yankowitz
My research in condensed matter physics under Prof. Matt Yankowitz is on the electronic transport of 2D materials. During my time under the CEI Fellowship, I will be investigating the properties and applications of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene aligned to hexagonal boron nitride. Combining these structural criteria in one nanoscale device is predicted to lead to remarkable phenomenons observable in graphene, most excitingly fractional Chern insulators (FCI). In FCIs, the fractionalized excitations are conducted by composite fermions, such as anyons. Due to their intrinsic topological properties, these anyons can be non-abelian, which is of significant interest in topological quantum computation. Compared to other materials capable of supporting FCI, the observation of this phenomenon in graphene has the advantage of being in a high mobility system with superior material quality, in which the results are more replicable and applicable to large scale systems.