2024 Segrè Lecture, featuring Pablo Jarillo-Herrero
October 28, 2024, 5:30 p.m.
Chevron Auditorium at International House
A Reception was held in the Slusser Room at 4:30 pm
View photos from the event HERE
Magic Angle Graphene: the Twist and Shout of Quantum Materials
The isolation 20 years ago of the first truly 2-dimensional, one atom-thick material, graphene, has revolutionized physics and materials science, and led to numerous applications. For example, it allowed the observation of deeply quantum relativistic phenomena directly at room temperature. Moreover, scientists quickly realized that new heterostructures sandwiching various 2D materials could be created, and that these exhibited pretty unique phenomena. In the past few years, physicists have been able to create captivating atomic structures by stacking and controllably twisting layers of graphene and other 2D materials. These are called moiré patterns, named after a 17th-century silk production technique. These atomic moiré structures took the material’s design to a qualitatively new level. The moiré materials appear to exhibit a plethora of novel phenomena, such as unconventional superconductivity and magnetism, ferroelectricity, and much more. In this talk, I will review the discovery and physics of graphene and explain the principles and beauty of moiré materials. I will also provide a broad outlook of some exciting new directions and practical applications of this emerging field.
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero is currently Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT. He received his “Licenciatura” in physics from the University of Valencia, Spain, in 1999. Then he spent two years at the University of California in San Diego, where he received a M.Sc. degree before going to the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2005. After a one-year postdoc in Delft, he moved to Columbia University, where he worked as a NanoResearch Initiative Fellow. He joined MIT as an assistant professor of physics in January 2008 and received tenure in 2015. He was promoted to Full Professor of Physics in 2018. His awards include the Spanish Royal Society Young Investigator Award (2006), an NSF Career Award (2008), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2009), a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (2009), the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Semiconductor Physics (2010), a DOE Early Career Award (2011), a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2012), an ONR Young Investigator Award (2013), and a Moore Foundation Experimental Physics in Quantum Systems Investigator Award (2014). Prof. Jarillo-Herrero has been selected as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics-Web of Science (2017-present), and was elected APS Fellow (2018), Fellow of the Quantum Materials Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR, 2019), and Member at Large of the APS Division of Condensed Matter Physics (2019). Prof. Jarillo-Herrero is the recipient of the APS 2020 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize, the 2020 Wolf Prize in Physics, the 2020 Medal of the Spanish Royal Physics Society, the 2021 Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture and Medal, the 2021 Max Planck Humboldt Research Award, and the 2021 US National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery. He became elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2022.