School of Physics Colloquium

Title: The Chemistry of Quantum Materials

Speaker: Leslie M. Schoop

Host: Itamar Kimchi

Abstract: As chemists, we are familiar with guidelines and heuristics that help us to predict how chemical reactions will proceed. My group is interested to expand these heuristics to the field of quantum matter. One area we are interested in is to predict, synthesize, and characterize two-dimensional (2D) magnets with high electronic mobility. I will explain how we derived chemical heuristics based on crystals structure, chemical bonds, and elemental composition to successfully predict such materials. This way, we were able to introduce a magnetic 2D material with record mobility. Another material identified this way might be a room temperature metallic 2D ferromagnet.

We further implemented heuristics to discover novel complex topological phases, including magnetic ones, and phases that are in competition with complex structural distortions. I will show how structural distortions can have a positive effect on topological band structures. 
 
Finally, I will discuss the concept of chemical exfoliation for the synthesis of novel 2D quantum materials. With this method, we can exfoliate materials for which the scotch tape method fails. I will show how we were able to synthesize several new 2D materials this way, and discuss advantages and limitations of soft-chemical methods for the synthesis of 2D quantum matter.

Bio: Dr. Schoop received her Diploma in Chemistry from Johannes Gutenberg University (2010) and PhD in Chemistry from Princeton University (2015). She then went on to work as a Minerva fast-track fellow under Professor Bettina Lotsch at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (2015-2017). Dr. Schoop joined the Princeton University Department of Chemistry Faculty in 2017. In 2019 she won the Beckman Young Investigator award and became a Moore foundation EPiQS Materials Synthesis Investigator. In 2020 she was awareded the Packard fellowship for science and engineering and in 2021 the Sloan fellowship in Chemistry and the DOD Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award. In 2022 you was awarded the NSF CAREER award. The Schoop Lab is working at the interface of chemistry and physics, using chemical principles to find new materials with exotic physical properties.