Orion Ciftja

Last updated
Orion Ciftja
BornNovember, 1967
Alma mater International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS), Trieste, Italy
Scientific career
Fields Theoretical physics
Institutions Prairie View A&M University

Orion Ciftja is a physicist and tenured professor at Prairie View A&M University. Ciftja specializes in theoretical physics with strong emphasis in condensed matter physics. His main areas of interest are quantum hall effect, nanoscale structures, and strongly correlated electronic systems. [1] [2]

Contents

Awards

Orion Ciftja has been awarded several National Science Foundation research grants. [3] He also received the distinguished honor of being the KITP scholar in the years 2007–2009. [4] He also has received the Texas A&M University System Teaching Excellence Award on several occasions. [5]

Selected publications

Ciftja has published over 100 refereed papers, has more than 10,000 reads, and has more than 1000 citations to his work.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Condensed matter physics</span> Branch of physics dealing with a property of matter

Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter, especially the solid and liquid phases which arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms. More generally, the subject deals with "condensed" phases of matter: systems of many constituents with strong interactions between them. More exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at low temperature, the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms, and the Bose–Einstein condensate found in ultracold atomic systems. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by experiments to measure various material properties, and by applying the physical laws of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, and other theories to develop mathematical models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Superconductivity</span> Electrical conductivity with exactly zero resistance

Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered, even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kondo effect</span> Physical phenomenon due to impurities

In physics, the Kondo effect describes the scattering of conduction electrons in a metal due to magnetic impurities, resulting in a characteristic change i.e. a minimum in electrical resistivity with temperature. The cause of the effect was first explained by Jun Kondo, who applied third-order perturbation theory to the problem to account for scattering of s-orbital conduction electrons off d-orbital electrons localized at impurities. Kondo's calculation predicted that the scattering rate and the resulting part of the resistivity should increase logarithmically as the temperature approaches 0 K. Experiments in the 1960s by Myriam Sarachik at Bell Laboratories provided the first data that confirmed the Kondo effect. Extended to a lattice of magnetic impurities, the Kondo effect likely explains the formation of heavy fermions and Kondo insulators in intermetallic compounds, especially those involving rare earth elements such as cerium, praseodymium, and ytterbium, and actinide elements such as uranium. The Kondo effect has also been observed in quantum dot systems.

In physics, quasiparticles and collective excitations are closely related emergent phenomena arising when a microscopically complicated system such as a solid behaves as if it contained different weakly interacting particles in vacuum.

A two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is a scientific model in solid-state physics. It is an electron gas that is free to move in two dimensions, but tightly confined in the third. This tight confinement leads to quantized energy levels for motion in the third direction, which can then be ignored for most problems. Thus the electrons appear to be a 2D sheet embedded in a 3D world. The analogous construct of holes is called a two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG), and such systems have many useful and interesting properties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sankar Das Sarma</span>

Sankar Das Sarma is an India-born American theoretical condensed matter physicist, who has worked in the broad research topics of theoretical physics, condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics, quantum physics, and quantum information. He has been a member of the Department of Physics at University of Maryland, College Park since 1980.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum vortex</span> Quantized flux circulation of some physical quantity

In physics, a quantum vortex represents a quantized flux circulation of some physical quantity. In most cases, quantum vortices are a type of topological defect exhibited in superfluids and superconductors. The existence of quantum vortices was first predicted by Lars Onsager in 1949 in connection with superfluid helium. Onsager reasoned that quantisation of vorticity is a direct consequence of the existence of a superfluid order parameter as a spatially continuous wavefunction. Onsager also pointed out that quantum vortices describe the circulation of superfluid and conjectured that their excitations are responsible for superfluid phase transitions. These ideas of Onsager were further developed by Richard Feynman in 1955 and in 1957 were applied to describe the magnetic phase diagram of type-II superconductors by Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov. In 1935 Fritz London published a very closely related work on magnetic flux quantization in superconductors. London's fluxoid can also be viewed as a quantum vortex.

Alexander Rudolf Hamilton is with the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is notable in the area of experimental condensed matter physics, particularly semiconductor nanofabrication and the study of quantum effects in nanometer scale electronic devices at ultra-low temperatures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Ceperley</span>

David Matthew Ceperley is a theoretical physicist in the physics department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UIUC. He is a world expert in the area of Quantum Monte Carlo computations, a method of calculation that is generally recognised to provide accurate quantitative results for many-body problems described by quantum mechanics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trojan wave packet</span> Wave packet that is nonstationary and nonspreading

A trojan wave packet is a wave packet that is nonstationary and nonspreading. It is part of an artificially created system that consists of a nucleus and one or more electron wave packets, and that is highly excited under a continuous electromagnetic field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Robert Nelson</span> American physicist (born 1951)


David R. Nelson is an American physicist, and Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics, at Harvard University.

In condensed matter physics, a quantum spin liquid is a phase of matter that can be formed by interacting quantum spins in certain magnetic materials. Quantum spin liquids (QSL) are generally characterized by their long-range quantum entanglement, fractionalized excitations, and absence of ordinary magnetic order.

Dieter Vollhardt is a German physicist and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Augsburg.

Elisa Molinari is an Italian physicist from the University of Modena and CNR, Italy. She has been primarily interested in computational materials science and nanotechnologies, and she has been particularly active in the theory of fundamental properties of low-dimensional structures, in the simulation of nanodevices, in the development of related computational methods. She also has a continuing interest in scientific imaging and communication.

Professor Lan Wang is a Chinese/Australian material scientist known for expertise in materials synthesis and advanced materials characterisation.

Cristiane de Morais Smith Lehner is a Brazilian theoretical physicist and professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, where she leads a research group studying condensed matter physics, cold atoms and strongly-correlated systems. In 2019, the European Physical Society awarded Morais Smith its Emmy Noether Distinction.

Katherine Birgitta Whaley is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist in the Division of Chemical Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At UC Berkeley, Whaley is the Director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center, a member of the executive board for the Center for Quantum Coherent Science, and a member of the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Whaley is a member of the Quantum Algorithms Team for Chemical Sciences in the research area of resource-efficient algorithms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Hallberg</span> Argentine physicist

Karen Astrid Hallberg is an Argentine professor of physics at the Balseiro Institute. She is Research Director at the Bariloche Atomic Centre and a 2019 L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science Laureate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electron-on-helium qubit</span> Quantum bit

An electron-on-helium qubit is a quantum bit for which the orthonormal basis states |0⟩ and |1⟩ are defined by quantized motional states or alternatively the spin states of an electron trapped above the surface of liquid helium. The electron-on-helium qubit was proposed as the basic element for building quantum computers with electrons on helium by Platzman and Dykman in 1999. 

William P. Halperin is a Canadian-American physicist, academic, and researcher. He is the Orrington Lunt Professor of Physics at Northwestern University.

References

  1. Leiva, Ashley. "Orion Ciftja". Prairie View A&M University.
  2. "Orion Ciftja publications Loop". loop.
  3. "NSF Award Search: Award # 0804568 - RUI - Anisotropy in Correlated Electronic Systems in Quantum Hall Regime". National Science Foundation.
  4. "KITP Scholars Directory". KITP.
  5. "Nine Faculty Honored as Teaching Excellence Winners". Texas A&M College of Science. 3 March 2009.