News

"All is well with particle-hole symmetry". Roger Mong and colleagues accross the United States provided strong evidence for a recent conjecture that contrasts with the predictions of standard theory and predicts a liquid consisting of massless Dirac particles that respects the symmetry between particles and holes

In an external magnetic field, the energy of an electron in a two-dimensional system takes discrete values, called Landau levels. At high enough fields, all electrons in a solid can fit in the lowest Landau level. If exactly half of that level is filled with electrons, standard theory predicts that a special fermion liquid phase will form that makes a distinction between the filled and empty states (particles and holes). However, a recent conjecture, in contrast, predicted a liquid consisting of massless Dirac particles that respects the symmetry between particles and holes, for which the authors of this paper provided strong evidence.

The APS GQI is sponsoring membership for all APS members for the next year.

The external advisory committee of the University of Pittsburgh’s Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation (MCSI) has awarded four faculty members with research seed grants totaling $190,630 for the 2016/2017 year.

This year’s recipients include PQI faculty William Stanchina for his proposal on "β- Ga2O3 Nanoelectronics: A Path to a Sustainable Semiconductor Technology for High Efficiency Electricity Conversion from Renewables."

The American Physical Society (APS) has named PQI faculty David Snoke one of the 146 Outstanding Referees of 2016 for exceptional help in assessing manuscripts for publication in the Physical Review journals.

Like Fellowship in the APS and other organizations, this is a lifetime award, and the Outstanding Referees are to be congratulated and thanked for their outstanding service to the physics community.

PQI faculty Sergey Frolov and Di Xiao were among the 24 Cottrell Scholars for 2016. The announcement was made last week by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), and the designation comes with a $100,000 award for each recipient for research and teaching.

“The computers of the future may be born in Sara Majetich’s labs” reads the header of a recent news article.

For the past three years, Majetich has been a principal investigator for the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN), which coordinates the research of 32 professors from 18 universities towards overcoming the limits of traditional computer design with spintronic technology.

Congratulations to the newest Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and PQI Professor Peyman Givi!

PQI Professor Peyman Givi received his award from the Provost Patricia Beeson during his inaugural lecture entitled "Exascale HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing in Rocket Science". This distinction was awarded to Peyman for his visionary mind, his outstanding research, as well as his incredible mentorship.

In their latest article, Jeremy Levy and his group put forward compelling experimental evidence of the role of surface chemistry on conductivity in complex oxides heterostructures. 

This work, published in Nature Communications on February 10, 2016 illustrates how the conductivity of the 2DEG layer in LAO/STO can be modulated using solvent immersion and illumination. 

"Scanning near-field optical microscopy combined with pump–probe spectroscopy can resolve ultrafast dynamics at the nanoscale."

In this short article, Hrvoje Petek reflects on a new technique that combines the nanometre resolution of near-field microscopy with the femtosecond resolution of pump–probe spectroscopy. This technique has been developed by Markus Raschke and colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder and submitted in the present issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

The 251^st American Chemical Society national meeting and exposition will be held from March 13-17, 2016 at San Diego, CA. The theme this year is "Computers in Chemistry", and PQI faculty Ken Jordan is co-organizing a session entitled Metastable Electronic States: Recent Advances In Theory and Experiment.