Vidya Madhavan

Last updated
Vidya Madhavan
Alma mater Indian Institutes of Technology
Boston University
Scientific career
Institutions Boston College
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
University of California, Berkeley

Vidya Madhavan is an Indian American physicist who is Professor of Condensed Matter at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research considers the spin and charge of quantum materials. She combines high resolution characterization techniques with precise fabrication and growth techniques. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015.

Contents

Early life and education

Madhavan studied metallurgical engineering at the Indian Institutes of Technology. [1] She remained there for her graduate studies, where she worked on solid state physics and materials science. [2] She moved to the United States for her doctoral research, where she joined Boston University. [3] After earning her PhD, Madhavan joined the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher.[ citation needed ]

Research and career

In 2002, Madhavan was appointed to the faculty at Boston College, where she found that phonons (lattice vibrations) were involved in superconductivity. [4] She moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a professor in 2014.[ citation needed ] Her research considers the interaction between spin, charge and structure in quantum materials. She has developed (spin-polarized) scanning tunnelling microscopy to understand emergent phenomena in unconventional superconductors, topological systems and two-dimensional materials. She has studied unconventional superconductors (with a focus on chiral superconductors), which maintain their superconductivity when in the presence of high magnetic fields likely due to the presence of Majorana particles on their surfaces. Madhavan used STM to identify these Majorana quasiparticles on the surface of uranium ditelluride. [5] [6]

Topological insulators exhibit spin momentum locking, a quantum phenomenon in which the spin of an electron depends on its direction of travel. Madhavan has observed spin-polarized tunnelling in anti-feromagnets. [7]

Madhavan has pursued quantum systems with long lifetimes for quantum information science. She is particularly interested in Mott insulators, which can be fabricated using exfoliation and controlled using lithography. She has demonstrated that they can achieve lifetimes of a few seconds at room temperature. [8]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tungsten ditelluride</span> Chemical compound

Tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) is an inorganic semimetallic chemical compound. In October 2014, tungsten ditelluride was discovered to exhibit an extremely large magnetoresistance: 13 million percent resistance increase in a magnetic field of 60 tesla at 0.5 kelvin. The resistance is proportional to the square of the magnetic field and shows no saturation. This may be due to the material being the first example of a compensated semimetal, in which the number of mobile holes is the same as the number of electrons. Tungsten ditelluride has layered structure, similar to many other transition metal dichalcogenides, but its layers are so distorted that the honeycomb lattice many of them have in common is in WTe2 hard to recognize. The tungsten atoms instead form zigzag chains, which are thought to behave as one-dimensional conductors. Unlike electrons in other two-dimensional semiconductors, the electrons in WTe2 can easily move between the layers.

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References

  1. ↑ Communications, Grainger Engineering Office of Marketing and. "Vidya Madhavan". iquist.illinois.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  2. ↑ Anecdotes and Science: Musings on My Career Path by Prof Vidya Madhavan | University of Illinois . Retrieved 2024-05-08– via www.youtube.com.
  3. ↑ Communications, Grainger Engineering Office of Marketing and. "Vidya Madhavan". physics.illinois.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  4. ↑ "Boston College physicists find new explanation for superconductivity's 'glue'". EurekAlert!. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  5. ↑ Communications, Grainger Engineering Office of Marketing and. "New measurements reveal evidence of elusive particles in a newly-discovered superconductor". grainger.illinois.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  6. ↑ Suplee, Anne. "The Many Wonders of Uranium Ditelluride - UMD Physics". umdphysics.umd.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  7. ↑ Aishwarya, Anuva; Cai, Zhuozhen; Raghavan, Arjun; Romanelli, Marisa; Wang, Xiaoyu; Li, Xu; Gu, G. D.; Hirsbrunner, Mark; Hughes, Taylor; Liu, Fei; Jiao, Lin; Madhavan, Vidya (2022-09-09). "Spin-selective tunneling from nanowires of the candidate topological Kondo insulator SmB 6". Science. 377 (6611): 1218–1222. arXiv: 2209.04993 . doi:10.1126/science.abj8765. ISSN   0036-8075.
  8. ↑ Aishwarya, Anuva; Raghavan, Arjun; Howard, Sean; Cai, Zhuozhen; Thakur, Gohil S.; Won, Choongjae; Cheong, Sang-Wook; Felser, Claudia; Madhavan, Vidya (2022-05-31). "Long-lifetime spin excitations near domain walls in 1T-TaS 2". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (22). doi:10.1073/pnas.2121740119. ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   9296906 . PMID   35617430.
  9. ↑ "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  10. ↑ "Vidya Madhavan". CIFAR. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  11. ↑ "Investigator Detail". www.moore.org. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  12. ↑ "Vidya Madhavan | American Academy of Arts and Sciences". www.amacad.org. 2024-05-08. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  13. ↑ Forrest, Sharita. "Three Illinois scientists elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences". news.illinois.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
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