2019 Mayer Scholarship Recipient

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce that Luke St. Marie is the recipient of the 2019 Professor Walter G. Mayer Endowed Scholarship, which supports a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in experimental physics.

Luke’s research involves fabricating highly sensitive bolometers in order to perform electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy on single molecule magnets (SMM) deposited in thin layers. SMMs are nanomagnets with applications in high-density data storage, molecular spintronics, and quantum computing. However, characterizing SMMs is difficult, especially when they are in thin layers. As SMM properties change when in thin layers, and most potential applications require these thin layers, developing new and better ways to characterize thin layers of SMMs would be a huge boon to SMM research. By utilizing highly sensitive graphene bolometers, Luke’s research aims to make EPR spectroscopy a viable tool for characterization of thin layer SMMs.

So far, Luke has demonstrated that nanostructured graphene quantum dots can be used as bolometers with extremely high sensitivity. He has investigated how SMMs can be deposited onto these devices in uniform thin layers by sublimation. He hopes to soon use these devices to perform EPR measurements on a variety of SMM species and investigate the effects different substrates have on SMMs.