Prof. Erik Henriksen has received an NSF CAREER award. This highly competitive grant is a wonderful recognition of his pioneering research in condensed matter and materials physics.
The CAREER award is a 5-year $850k award titled, "CAREER:Cyclotron resonance spectroscopy of interacting fermions.” Henriksen's group will explore many-particle physics in graphene & other atomically-thin materials, and also so-called strongly correlated materials, using a combination of electronic measurements and infrared magneto-spectroscopy. Key to this is a custom system they built to pursue broadband infrared spectroscopy at temperatures as low as 0.1 K and magnetic fields up to 14 T (that’s a very strong field!). In particular, they are now working on “cavity quantum electrodynamics” of graphene - in the “ultra-strong coupling regime” of light interacting with matter; chasing the spectroscopy of Hofstadter’s fractal butterfly; and looking for signatures of emergent uncharged particles in materials where the electrons interact with each other so strongly that they are frozen in place and only magnetic echoes of their motion remain.
