Sergey Frolov Lands ONR Grant to Study Majorana Fermions
PQI faculty Sergey Frolov has received a $3 million Office of Naval Research Basic Research Challenge grant to explore ways of transforming quantum computing through the use of an unusual particle. Frolov will be the primary investigator for the study on the Majorana fermion, a long-posited but elusive elementary particle that Frolov and colleagues discovered in 2012.
"First, this is of great fundamental interest to science," Frolov says. "We are greatly expanding the horizons of our knowledge, and we may be adding a new, third class of fundamental particles to fermions and bosons."
A journal article by PQI researchers investigating the properties of copper nanomeshes to form transparent electrodes was one of the Top 20 articles downloaded from the journal Nano Letters web site in April 2014. 
Sara Majetich has received a seed grant from CMU's 
Materials Issues for Quantum Computation: The new field of quantum computing uses qubits (quantum bits) in place of classical bits to carry out certain types of computation. Physical systems that act as qubits encompass a wide range of technologies, from ions, to local defect states in crystals, and on to microelectronic devices addressable with wire interconnects. Materials issues arise in all of these, and this issue of MRS Bulletin describes how materials challenges and opportunities arise and have been used to make qubit-based quantum circuits using very different materials systems.
PQI faculty Sergey Frolov co-authors a paper in 
PQI faculty Paul W. Leu and Kevin P. Chen were awarded a $107,498 Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER grant) to develop a new process for the scalable laser manufacturing of more efficient solar cells. 
The Charles E. Kaufman Foundation, part of The Pittsburgh Foundation, today announced its first series of grants – amounting to almost $1.6 million – to support cutting-edge scientific research at institutions across the State of Pennsylvania.
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The recently published paper in journal of ACS NANO on Ultrafast Microscopy of Spin-Momentum Locked Surface Plasmon Polaritons is an essential research for designing optical elements to control spin-polarized SPP (surface plasmon polaritons) fields on the nano femto scale. Hrvoje Petek...
In the recently published paper in Scientific Reports , Sara A. Majetich and their colleagues have demonstrated the engineering of spin canting across a Magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) via the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). In this paper, they have shown that strong DMI...