IMX Seminar Series - Long-ranged coherence in quantum materials: the search for stable electronic waves

Quantum mechanical electron waves in a metal, quite like the everyday waves in a cup of tea, are governed by the size and shape of the vessel containing them. By controlling the shape of metals on the sub-micron scale, one can strongly influence their electronic properties and thereby achieve new functionality. The fabrication method we develop here at EPFL is a procedure based on Focused Ion Beam machining. As grown crystallites or particles are etched by a tightly focused beam of ions, which locally evaporates the crystal, leaving behind a sample of desired shape. I will review two recent applications of this concept to the transport of highly anisotropic metals in the ballistic limit, and nanostructured heavy-fermion superconductors and their applications in quantum information technology.
Bio: “Philip Moll received his Ph.D. in physics in 2012 at ETH Zurich, with a focus on iron-based high-temperature superconductors and their potential for high magnetic field applications. As a change in research directions, he joined the group of James Analytis at UC Berkeley to work on materials with topological band structure defects, such as Dirac- and Weyl-semi-metals. During that time, his research demonstrated the existence of a novel quantum process, the Weyl quantum oscillation. Based on these results, he successfully competed for an Independent Max-Planck Research Group (IMPRG) in 2016 at the Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany, and attracted an ERC Starting Project to focus onto topological matter. Since 2018 he is a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL at the Institute of Materials, where he particularly explores materials for quantum applications.”