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eBriefing

From Colloidal Systems to Frustrated Magnets: 7th Gotham-Metro Condensed Matter Meeting 2012

From Colloidal Systems to Frustrated Magnets
Reported by
Stephanie B. H. Kelly

Posted June 27, 2012

Overview

The Gotham-Metro Condensed Matter Meeting is a rare opportunity for New York area scientists interested in materials science, soft condensed matter, or hard condensed matter to initiate collaborations across the broad spectrum of fields covered at the conference. At the 7th Gotham-Metro symposium, held on April 20, 2012, those fields traversed everything from colloidal systems of single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) to quantum effects in frustrated magnets. Two leading faculty gave keynote presentations on soft and hard condensed matter, respectively, and six students had the chance to present their cutting-edge work to an audience of students and career scientists from industry and academia. The symposium closed with a lively discussion of the Hendrik Schön affair of fraudulent science, led by two scientists who helped break the scandal and reveal the truth.

Use the tabs above to find a meeting report and multimedia from this event.

Presentations available from:
Leon Balents, PhD (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Yang Bo (Princeton University)
Matthew Gratale (University of Pennsylvania)
Mohammad Islam, PhD (Carnegie Mellon University)
Harish Krishnamoorthy (Queens College)
Vivek Kumar (College of Staten Island)
Chuck-Hou Yee (Rutgers University)
Panelists: Don Monroe, PhD (formerly of AT&T Bell Laboratories) & Lydia Sohn, PhD (University of California, Berkeley)


Participating Institutions

Brookhaven National Laboratory
City College of New York, CUNY
College of Staten Island, CUNY
Columbia University
Lehigh University
New Jersey Institute of Technology

New York University
Rutgers University
Stevens Institute of Technology
SUNY, Stony Brook
University of Pennsylvania
Yale University

Journal Articles

Leon Balents

Aoki Y, Tsuchiya A, Kanayama T, et al. Time-reversal symmetry-breaking superconductivity in heavy-fermion PrOs4Sb12 detected by muon-spin relaxation. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2003;91(6):067003.

Molavian HR, Gingras MJP, Canals B. Dynamically induced frustration as a route to a quantum spin ice state in Tb2Ti2O7 via virtual crystal field excitations and quantum many-body effects. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2007;98(15):157204.

Ross K, Savary L, Gaulin B, Balents L. Quantum excitations in quantum spin ice. Phys. Rev. X 2011;1(2).

Savary L, Balents L. Coulombic quantum liquids in spin-1/2 pyrochlores. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2012;108(3):037202.

Savary L, Gull E, Trebst S, et al. Impurity effects in highly frustrated diamond-lattice antiferromagnets. Phys. Rev. B. 2011;84(6).

Xu C, Wang F, Qi Y, et al. Spin liquid phases for spin-1 systems on the triangular lattice. Phys. Rev. Lett. 2012;108(8):087204.

Mohammad F. Islam

Bryning M, Milkie D, Islam M, et al. Carbon nanotube aerogels. Adv. Mater. 2007;19(5):661-664.

Chen DTN, Chen K, Hough LA, et al. Rheology of carbon nanotube networks during gelation. Macromolecules 2010;43(4):2048-2053.

Green NL, Kaya D, Maloney CE, et al. Density invariant vibrational modes in disordered colloidal crystals. Phys. Rev. E Stat. Nonlin. Soft Matter Phys. 2011;83(5 Pt 1):051404.

Kaya D, Green NL, Maloney CE, et al. Normal modes and density of states of disordered colloidal solids. Science 2010;329(5992):656-658.

Kim KH, Vural M, Islam MF. Single-walled carbon nanotube aerogel-based elastic conductors. Adv. Mater. Weinheim. 2011;23(25):2865-2869.

Keynote Speakers

Leon Balents, PhD

University of California, Santa Barbara
e-mail | website | publications

Leon Balents is a theoretical physicist working broadly in the area of correlated electron systems, quantum magnetism, and complex materials. He received his PhD in 1994 from Harvard University, and is now a permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been on the faculty since 1999. He is known for contributions to a breadth of subjects in condensed matter physics. This includes correlation effects in carbon nanotubes and other one dimensional systems, exotic quantum critical phenomena, and spin liquids in frustrated magnets. With Joel Moore, he predicted the three dimensional topological insulator. Balents is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, the AP Sloan Fellowship, the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, and several visiting chairs. He is the author of more than 120 refereed journal publications, and has an h-index of 40 (Web of Science).

Mohammad F. Islam, PhD

Carnegie Mellon University
e-mail | website | publications

Mohammad F. Islam is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. He received his PhD in Physics from Lehigh University in 2000 focusing on aggregation and adsorption behavior of polyelectrolytes. He then moved to the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. There he worked on colloidal systems and carbon nanotubes. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 2005, and since then, he has received several awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2007), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), a Kavli Fellowship (2008), and a George Tallman Ladd Research Award (2009).

His current research interests are to investigate experimentally the microscopic structure and dynamics of synthetic and biological soft matter to better understand traditional concepts such as phase transitions, self-assembly, and the relationship between microscopic structure and macroscopic properties. He also applies his expertise in soft matter to challenges in nanoscience to answer fundamental scientific questions. Further, he employs both soft- and nanomaterials-approaches to engineer multifunctional materials with tailored optical, electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. These unique materials have diverse applications in areas such as photonics, fuel cells, supercapacitors, drug delivery vessels, scaffolds for tissue engineering, etc.


Speakers

Milan Begliarbekov

Stevens Institute of Technology
e-mail | website | publications

Yang Bo

Princeton University
e-mail

Matthew Gratale

University of Pennsylvania
e-mail | website

Matthew Gratale graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008, where he received a BS in Physics and completed his senior thesis with Tony Dinsmore. He is currently a Physics PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania working in Arjun Yodh's soft condensed matter lab.

Harish Krishnamoorthy

Queens College
e-mail | publications

Harish Krishnamoorthy received his MS in Photonics from the Cochin University of Science and Technology, India in 2007. Subsequently, he joined Vinod Menon's Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics at Queens College and Graduate Center of CUNY for his PhD. His current research interests include studying quantum optics using plasmonic and metamaterial systems.

Vivek Kumar

College of Staten Island
e-mail

Vivek Kumar is a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the City University of New York, where he studies carbon nanofilms for chemical sensing. He will be defending his dissertation this May. He holds a masters degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and an undergraduate degree form the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His previous research experience includes master's work on template synthesis of carbon from block copolymers and undergraduate thesis research on computational modeling of novel carbon-based hydrogen storage systems. As an intern at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, he processed raw cosmic ray data in a field study. A motivated researcher, he is also passionate about science outreach and has co founded Knowdium—a non-profit organization for science education through distance learning.

Chuck-Hou Yee

Rutgers University
e-mail | website

Chuck-Hou Yee's research focuses on strongly-correlated physics in transition-metal oxides. He is particularly interested in metal-insulator transitions and superconductivity, as well as in advancing the algorithms used to model the materials exhibiting these phenomena. He received his BS in Physics from Caltech, and is pursuing his PhD at Rutgers University under the direction of Kristjan Haule.


Panelists

Don Monroe, PhD

Freelance Science & Technology Writer
e-mail | website | publications

Don Monroe got BS and PhD degrees in physics from MIT in 1980 and 1985, respectively, and then became a member of staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. At Bell Labs and its successors he did research on impurity band conduction, superconductivity, optical fibers, silicon-germanium heterostructures, integrated-circuit power reduction, novel transistor structures, integrated optoelectronic devices, and gate-oxide reliability. In 2002, he sat on the five-person committee that investigated, and ultimately confirmed, the alleged scientific misconduct by Bell Labs physicist Hendrik Schön. In 2003, he entered New York University's program on science journalism, and since 2005 he has been a freelance science and technology writer and editor, with publications in Scientific American, Science, New Scientist, The Scientist, Technology Review, Physics, CACM, and others, as well as dozens of eBriefings for the New York Academy of Sciences.

Lydia Sohn, PhD

University of California, Berkeley
e-mail | website | publications

Lydia Sohn received her AB degree in Chemistry and Physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard–Radcliffe Colleges in 1988. She then received her AM in Physics in 1990 and PhD in Physics in 1992 from Harvard University. Following her graduate studies, Sohn held a one-year NSF/NATO postdoctoral appointment in Applied Physics at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. From 1993 – 1995 she was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the Semiconductor Physics Research Department, where she developed new methods of lithography with an atomic force microscope. Sohn joined the faculty at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor of Physics in 1995. Since 2003 Sohn has been part of the faculty in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. at UC Berkeley, where she currently is an Associate Professor. Her research centers on developing and employing quantitative techniques, advanced microscopy (e.g. 3D super-resolution imaging), and micro/nanofabrication technologies to access biological phenomena at the single cell level. Sohn has been the recipient of numerous awards including the National Science Foundation Faculty CAREER award, the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, and the DuPont Young Professor Award. Sohn is currently the Chair of UC Berkeley's Institutional Biosafety Committee and a member of its Research Compliance Advisory Committee. Furthermore, she is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for QB3's Core laboratory: the Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center. She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Boulder School for Condensed Matter & Materials Physics.


Student Organizing Committee

Yang Bo
Princeton University
e-mail
 
Betül Pamuk
SUNY, Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory
e-mail
 
Rostislav Boltyanskiy
Yale University
e-mail
 
Daniele Pinna
New York University
e-mail
 
Marco Bonett-Matiz
Yale University
e-mail
 
David Ruffner
New York University
e-mail
 
Yury Deshko
College of Staten Island, CUNY
e-mail
 
Anil Shrirao
New Jersey Institute of Technology
e-mail
 
Carl Goodrich
University of Pennsylvania
e-mail
 
Maryam Taheri Nejad
Rutgers University
e-mail
 
Yi Hu
Lehigh University
e-mail
 
Samarth Trivedi
New Jersey Institute of Technology
e-mail
 
Nilam Jadav
Stevens Institute of Technology
e-mail
 
Tahir Yusufaly
Rutgers University
e-mail
 
Jian Li
City College of New York, CUNY
e-mail
 
Zhonghua (Lukas) Zhao
City College of New York, CUNY
e-mail
 
Junichi Okamoto
Columbia University
e-mail
 
 

Faculty Organizers

Paul Chaikin, PhD
New York University
e-mail
 
Piers Coleman, PhD
Rutgers University
e-mail