Four ECE faculty members have been honored with Excellence in Advising and Teaching Awards by the College of Engineering. The annual awards recognize distinguished teaching and mentoring within the college, as well as leadership in path-breaking science and technical innovation.

September 2021: Former KIC postdoc fellow Chenhao Jin has won the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists. Jin, now a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was nominated by Cornell University for the award in Physical Sciences and Engineering. The Blavatnik Regional awards "honor outstanding postdoctoral scientists from academic research institutions across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut."

Cornell researchers and their collaborators will continue to advance quantum science and technology thanks to $5.4 million in new funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Cornell is leading two of 29 research projects announced July 23 by the DOE’s Office of Science. The funding supports researchers who are developing the next generation of quantum smart devices and computer technology, which are critical tools to solving pressing national challenges, according to U.S Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

Electrons in metals try to behave like obedient motorists, but they end up more like bumper cars. They may be reckless drivers, but a new Cornell-led study confirms this chaos has a limit established by the laws of quantum mechanics. The team’s paper, “Linear-in Temperature Resistivity From an Isotropic Planckian Scattering Rate,” written in collaboration with researchers led by Louis Taillefer from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, published July 28 in Nature. The paper’s lead author is Gael Grissonnanche, a postdoctoral fellow with the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science.

July 2021:  KIC faculty member Brad Ramshaw and KIC postdoc Gaël Grissonnanche have developed a calculation framework to accurately measure the Planckian Limit. '"Before, the 'Planckian limit' was just kind of inferred from data using very simple models. We did a very careful measurement and calculation and showed that it really is obeyed right down to the fine details. And we found that it’s isotropic, so it’s the same for electrons traveling in any direction."' The team's research has been published in Nature.

June 2021: A team led by KIC faculty member J.C. Seamus Davis, and which included KIC Fellow Xiaolong Liu, have discovered that Pair Density Wave (PDW) states exist in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD). The discovery provides a rich platform for discovery of new states of quantum matter and for development of new technologies.

In 2016, physicist J.C. Séamus Davis discovered an elusive state of quantum matter in the cuprates, which are copper oxide materials laced with other atoms. That launched a new sub-field in the study of quantum materials. But whether this was a unique phenomenon in the cuprates or a universal and important property of nature remained unknown – until now. Using an improved version of the radically new quantum microscope technology he developed for this purpose, Davis and his team have now found the same exotic state of quantum matter in a widely used and conventional type of material, the transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD). Their paper, “Discovery of a Cooper-pair Density Wave State in a Transition-metal Dichalcogenide,” published June 25 in Science. Co-authors include Cornell postdoctoral fellows Xiaolong Liu and Yi Xue Chong, and Rahul Sharma, Ph.D. ’20, a postdoc at the University of Maryland.

David Erickson, S.C. Thomas Sze Director of Cornell’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Sibley College Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was elected a member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE). As stated by the CAE, fellows are nominated and elected by their peers, in view of their distinguished achievements and career-long service to the engineering profession. Erickson’s multidisciplinary research efforts focus on mobile and global health, bioenergy, and nanomanipulation and are funded by a number of United States federal agencies including the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense.  

Cornell researchers have discovered a rare “pseudogap” phenomenon that helps explain how the superconducting transition temperature can be greatly boosted in a single monolayer of iron selenide, and how it might be applied to other superconducting materials. The group’s paper, “Incoherent Cooper Pairing and Pseudogap Behavior in Single-Layer FeSe/SrTiO3,” published June 10 in Physical Review X. The paper’s lead author is Brendan Faeth, Ph.D. ’20. The team was led by Kyle Shen, the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences, who, together with Faeth, sought to explore the properties of monolayer iron selenide because, as a high-temperature superconductor, it has the potential to help researchers create novel electrical devices that conduct with zero resistance and, therefore, much greater efficiency.

June 2021: team led by KIC faculty member Kyle Shen has discovered a rare "pseudogap" phenomenon that helps explain how the superconducting transition temperature can be greatly boosted in a single monolayer of iron selenide, and how it might be applied to other superconducting materials.