Charles D. Brown II, assistant professor of physics, and a member of Yale’s Wright Lab, has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award for his project “Analog Quantum Simulation of Quasicrystalline Topological Quantum Materials with Ultracold Atoms in Optical Quasicrystal Lattice Potentials”.
The NSF CAREER award—which comes with a substantial five-year grant—is a prestigious honor bestowed upon young faculty members with the purpose of supporting the early career activities of teachers and scholars who are most likely to become future academic leaders.
Brown said, “This NSF CAREER award is a springboard that will launch us into exploration of exciting many body physics. I’m incredibly grateful for and excited that the NSF has provided such substantial support of our research.”
Brown explained, “Quasicrystals are aperiodic crystals that have no translational symmetry, but that are long-range ordered with rotational symmetries that are forbidden in periodic lattices. These aperiodic crystals are thus an interesting and unique middle ground between media that are perfectly periodic or perfectly disordered.”
He continued, “We are going to use degenerate quantum matter (lithium atoms cooled to nano-Kelvin temperatures) that are trapped in quasiperiodic lattices made of light to explore the physics of quasicrystals in an entirely new way. We will dig deeply into how geometry and topology affect how quantum particles flow through quasiperiodic potentials.”