Physicist Hollen honored as Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator

Shawna Hollen, associate professor of physics, has been named to The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s 2024 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators. The prestigious honor, which is accompanied by $1.25 million in funding over the next five years, will advance understanding of the link between charge density waves and quantum dots, two physical phenomena that could lead to improvements in quantum computing.

“The ideas that I put forward [in my proposal] haven’t been demonstrated. It’s not something that anyone else is doing,” said Hollen. “It’s a huge honor to receive an award from the Moore Foundation.”

Charge density waves are regular patterns of charge that form in some crystals and can lead to some intriguing behavior, including superconductivity — a state in which current can flow with zero resistance, but only at extremely low temperatures. Hollen’s work will manipulate these nanoscale charge patterns to potentially create a new class of engineerable qubits — basic units of information in quantum computing — that could operate near room temperature.

Hollen will use the award to advance her research by increasing her staff—funding a postdoctoral researcher and Ph.D. student—and purchasing some equipment necessary for characterizing and manipulating the two-dimensional materials they study: an atomic force microscope and state-of-the-art glove boxes that use a nitrogen atmosphere. 

“These materials are air-sensitive so we need to be able to manipulate them in air-free environment,” said Hollen.

Hollen is grateful to the Moore Foundation for supporting work she says is “riskier and more creative” than research generally funded by federal agencies. The Experimental Physics Investigator honor specifically supports “novel and potentially high-payoff projects that will advance the field of physics but might be hard to fund through traditional funding sources.”

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