Fellows selected for new graduate fellowship program with University of California, Irvine

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Austin Green (left) and Marshall Campbell (right)

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The University of California, Irvine School of Physical Sciences and Los Alamos National Laboratory have partnered to create a new graduate fellowship program to support physical sciences students as they engage in collaborative research between the school and the Laboratory. The first two fellows are Marshall Campbell of the UCI department of physics and astronomy, and Austin Green of the UCI department of chemistry. Campbell works with UCI professor Luis A. Jauregui and will collaborate with researcher Michael Pettes at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), while Green works with UCI professors Craig Martens and Shaul Mukamel, and will partner with Sergei Tretiak of the Los Alamos theoretical division. 

The fellowship is intended for those performing research in climate change and environmental systems science and engineering; renewable energy research, development and deployment; and materials and chemical research.

A fourth-year graduate student in the UCI physics and astronomy program, Campbell is also a graduate research assistant and GEM Fellow with CINT, working with Pettes since July 2021 on research that has so far yielded data for two publications still in preparation, related to strain engineering of two-dimensional material assemblies. Campbell’s fellowship project investigates the influence of strain and high magnetic fields on Dirac semimetals, a new class of topological quantum materials that possess strain-dependent properties. The project will specifically focus on HfTe₅, a material having a strain response that should be measurable at relatively low magnetic fields in the sub-16 tesla range. If successful, these pilot experiments at cryogenic temperatures will open the door to examination of the response of such materials to much higher fields — up to 60 tesla, requiring microelectromechanical systems created using the microfabrication capabilities available in the Pettes laboratory, the CINT Core Integration Laboratory and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Green is a third-year graduate student who has coauthored one publication with Martens, while also working extensively with Mukamel. Martens and Green bring a new theoretical tool, Moyal Augmented Dynamics (MAD), to the existing collaboration between Mukamel and Tretiak. The MAD tool is capable of leveraging classical dynamics to model quantum coherences. Such coherences are important in the spectroscopic method called Transient Redistribution of Ultrafast Electronic Coherences in Attosecond Raman Signals (TRUECARS). With Green’s proposed research, the investigators will explore the applicability of the MAD formalism to the modeling of TRUECARS experiments that could be performed on X-Ray Free-Electron Laser facilities. Green will begin with previously studied molecular systems and ultimately focus his research on the design of coherently controlled quantum materials.