Dr. Yi-Fan Zhao is a CEI Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow and a member of Xiaodong Xu’s lab in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington. His research is focused on integrating advanced two-dimensional materials that exhibit partial electronic charges into contemporary electronic technologies, aiming to develop a whole new branch of energy-efficient electronic devices as well as quantum computing capabilities “beyond Moore’s Law”, i.e. not limited by gradual improvements in conventional nanoscale fabrication of transistors on computer chips.
As published in Nature in 2023, the Xu Group made the groundbreaking discovery of fractional electronic charges without an external magnetic field in devices made of 2D layers of MoTe2 with a “moiré twist” that slightly misaligns the crystal lattices to unlock new properties. Moiré-twisted MoTe2 is a quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) insulator: a class of materials in which the interior is insulating, but electrons can travel without resistance along one-dimensional clockwise or counter-clockwise conducting channels. QAH insulators could help make future electronic devices more efficient by eliminating energy losses from heat dissipation, while fractional QAH states could be harnessed to encode information in quantum computers.
Prior to joining the UW, Zhao was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (ENSI) at the University of California, Berkeley, which is partnered with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from Penn State University in December 2022, where he also performed postdoctoral research before joining ENSI.