Seminar

Robert L. Kleinberg is an Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.  From 1980 to 2018 he was employed by Schlumberger, attaining the rank of Schlumberger Fellow, one of about a dozen who hold this rank in a workforce of 100,000. He has served on or advised numerous government and academic committees on energy policy, and is a coauthor with Harvard faculty of a textbook on energy technology, in preparation. Dr. Kleinberg was educated at the University of California, Berkeley (B.S. Chemistry, 1971) and the University of California, San Diego (Ph.D. Physics, 1978). From 1978 to 1980 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Exxon Corporate Research Laboratory in Linden, NJ. His work at Schlumberger focused on geophysical measurements and the characterization and delineation of unconventional fossil fuel resources. His current interests include energy technology and economics. Dr. Kleinberg has authored more than 100 academic and professional papers, holds 38 U.S. patents, and is the inventor of several geophysical instruments that have been commercialized on a worldwide basis. He is the recipient of the 2018-2019 American Physical Society Distinguished Lectureship Award on the Applications of Physics, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy.

Porous electrical conductors are a desirable yet evasive class of materials that would play a key role in the development of novel electrical energy storage devices. Their high surface area and electrical conductivity enable the uptake of electrolyte into their pores, forming the basis for a supercapacitive device. Metal-organic frameworks are an emerging subset of porous materials with fleeting reports of electrical conductivity suitably high for super capacitor implementation. This talk discusses our efforts to understand what gives rise to conductivity in metal-organic frameworks, and...

John David Crawford was an expert in dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, which is the study of systems that are subject to strong driving. This talk will discuss why this area of research is important for quantum computation. In particular, it will be shown how concepts from nonlinear dynamics proved to be critical in the development and improvement of qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum computers, using quantum dots in silicon/silicon-germanium heterostructures.

Most of our understanding of the properties of materials comes from the study of thermal equilibrium, which is the state reached if one leaves a system undisturbed for long enough. But for many disordered materials, “long enough” is often years or even centuries. This talk will discuss how insights from the study of nonlinear dynamics, the field to which John David Crawford made many important contributions, have enabled us to understand some striking phenomena that do not occur in thermal equilibrium and are seen in experiments.

The scientific community has been striving for decades to generate biomimetic materials to access many of the beneficial properties seen in Nature. Significant efforts have been devoted to systems that contain a small number of variables and can be mastered without too many unknowns. However, there has been limited success in generating complex systems as seen in Nature. As the systemic complexity increases, the phase diagram becomes less manageable with many possible states and kinetic pathways. Our central hypothesis is that rational design can lead to control over system energy...

Which physical properties of 2D and layered materials can we exploit for powering the next generation of devices that power all of classical information systems?  And which 2D materials are showing promise to enable the future quantum information systems, and why? I will discuss the two questions above. The first question will lead us to the quantum mechanical roots of why current state of the art transistors are slipping away ~1000x more energy than what is needed for logic operations.  And more so than logic, the bottleneck of memory devices threatens to significantly throttle increased...

Abstract: A new direction in topological quantum matter research is the exploration of the large class of nonsymmorphic metals which include glide symmetry operations in their space group (a glide gx =Mx.T is a mirror reflection Mx combined with a fractional translation T in the mirror plane). The layered material KHgSb is analogous to stacking graphene together with distinct ions in the A and B sublattices. A half-lattice translation between adjacent layers renders it nonsymmorphic. KHgSb has been predicted to feature double quantum spin Hall (QSH) surface states in addition to hourglass...

Light-matter interaction is at the heart of most optical processes we are familiar with such as absorption, emission and scattering. These are normally treated by assuming that the incident light does not significantly modify the underlying electronic states of the material it interacts with. The strong coupling regime consists of the extreme case where light-matter interaction is so strong that it must be treated non-pertubatively. Polaritons, the resulting mixed light-matter particles, can be the source of many unique phenomena. We will describe how these quasiparticles can be exploited...