Initiative (or Superseed) II: New States of Frustrated and Correlated Materials @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Senior Investigators: Young Lee (co-leader), Dan Nocera (co-leader), Shaoyan Chu, Eric Hudson, Daniel Shim
Research Goals: This Initiative Project will focus on materials based on two-dimensional triangular and kagome lattices. These materials will serve as launching points for delving further in exciting new directions, such as probing exotic states of quantum matter that contain "topological order." This new order leads to a host of fascinating properties, such as fractional quantum numbers, non-Abelian statistics, emergent photons, and more. Quantum spins on a kagome lattice may exhibit this novel type of topological order which would have possible applications in quantum computing. The addition of mobile charge carriers into these systems may lead to unconventional superconductivity and non-Fermi liquid ground states. There is clearly much interesting territory to explore once candidate samples are synthesized. The objective is to identify and synthesize new states of matter based on frustrated spin systems.
