Prof. Barbara and her colleague at New Mexico Tech, Prof. Nikolai Kalugin, awarded a three-year NSF collaborative grant

Prof. Barbara and her colleague at New Mexico Tech, Prof. Nikolai Kalugin, were recently awarded a three-year NSF collaborative grant for a project titled Floquet-Bloch topological states in quantum Hall systems.  Recent theories predict that light can act as a switch to induce new quantum electronic states in some atomically thin materials. These new states are named topological states and they yield robust, dissipationless currents along the perimeter of the two-dimensional material. This project will involve collaborations with the University of Chile-Santiago (Prof. Luis Foa Torres)  and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, FL (Dr. Alexey Suslov) to study the generation of  these edge states by driving two-dimensional materials away from equilibrium, thereby inducing topological states “on demand”.