Fall 2017

On October 24, 2017 house committee on science, space, and technology held hearings on “American Leadership in Quantum Technology QT.” The goal of the hearing was to provide audiences the view of United States’ (US) and other nations’ research and development efforts to develop quantum computing and related technologies, and to identify what more can be done to robust these efforts. For this regard, committee members made their opening statements on quantum technology and US leadership in this area.  Witnesses from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), IBM, National Photonic Initiative, and Argon National Lab were emphasized the importance of study and research in quantum information science and technology to sustain the leadership in this area.

In this work, authors used conductive atomic force microscope (c-AFM) lithography in which the conduction is controlled by surface protons that are distributed on the LAO surface. They have created two conducting channel with varying witdhs as 10 and 200nm on a  LAO/STO heterostructures grown by pulsed-laser deposition. They designed the the devices in a way that two conducting channels connected in series with two leads and voltage probes. By using silver epoxy on the bottom of the STO substrate they created contacts for a back gate voltage. They investigated changes in the magnetotransport properties on the channels with different widths by varying back gate voltage and applied magnetic field. They measured the conductance for both narrow and wide channels and demonstarted the hysteresis of both channels with back gating. Saturation of the conductance at higher gate voltages was also shown. They were able to demonstrate dimensional crossover from 2d to 1D behavior with their magnetoconductance measurements.



In Nature, there exist materials with exotic properties that cannot be understood in the framework of classical theories. Such properties, however, are beautifully described by more sophisticated theoretical tools involving quantum mechanics.  Such materials are now known as the “quantum materials”. The range of exotic properties exhibited by the quantum materials is extremely broad and includes superconductivity, superfluidity, ferromagnetism, quantum hall effect, spin-liquidity, topological insulation, to name a few.

Superconductors, discovered by Kammerlingh Onnes, 1911, were first to emerge as quantum materials. In normal metals, the resistance arises due to inelastic scattering between the charge carriers (electrons) and defects in the periodic crystal lattice. The defects or scattering centres can be any distortion to the periodicity of the lattice like those due to presence of impurity or the thermal vibration of the lattice points. In superconductors, surprisingly, the resistance becomes zero despite the presence of a large number of impurities and at high temperatures where the lattice points can undergo vigorous thermal vibration. The question that how the charge carriers remained insensitive to such strong scattering centres could not be answered within any classical picture. A microscopic understanding of superconductivity was first provided by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (BCS) in 1951, only after substantial development of quantum mechanics and quantum field theories – the theories where quantum mechanics is combined with Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Recently Benjamin M. Hunt and his colleagues developed a new technique for measuring the layer-resolved charge density, from which they can map layer polarization of the valley or spin quantum numbers in bilayer graphine and other two dimensional materials. In this study, they demonstrated direct measurement of valley and orbital levels in bilayer graphite. They have detected that the four valley and orbital components have different weights on the two layers of the bilayer. By using Hunt’s technique one can probe layer, valley, and spin polarization quantitatively in other atomic layered materials, including twisted bilayer graphene and both homobilayer and heterobilayer of transition metal dichalcogenide

In a recently published paper in Physics Today, David Snoke, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh and Jonathan Keeling who is a reader in theoretical condensed-matter physics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, have shown the superfluidity of light where photon treats as a gas of interacting bosonic atoms. They have demonstrated that how to engineer a Bose–Einstein condensation from light.