Gia-Wei Chern and Xuedan Ma receive Postdoc Distinguished Performance Awards

-

-

The Laboratory honored Gia-Wei Chern and Xuedan Ma with Distinguished Postdoc Distinguished Performance Awards. The awards recognize individuals or teams of no more than three who were major contributors towards outstanding and unique research resulting in a positive, significant impact on the Laboratory’s programmatic efforts, or status in the scientific community. Technical contact: Mary Anne With

Gia-Wei Chern, (Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems/Center for Nonlinear Studies, T-4/T-CNLS), a J. Robert Oppenheimer Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, is recognized for his outstanding research and leadership in condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics. Chern has made seminal contributions to highly frustrated many-body systems, with applications in condensed matter, atomic, and statistical physics. These contributions include the discovery of novel magnetic orderings in frustrated itinerant magnets, the derivation of the concept of stiffness by disorder in statistical physics, and the design of new artificial spin ice systems with subtle emergent behavior that a Nature commentary calls “a first step into an uncharted territory”. Chern is leading the first attempt to add electronic correlations to tight-binding molecular dynamics, an innovative and promising method for modeling the lattice dynamics of strongly correlated materials, such as lanthanides and actinides. He is a prolific author of papers in top quality journals, leading theoretical proposals that have produced high impact in the community by prompting new experimental advances. During 2014, Chern published one article in Nature, two articles in Nature Physics, and three articles in Physical Review Letters. Cristian Batista (T-4) nominated him.

Xuedan Ma (Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, MPA-CINT) is recognized for her groundbreaking contributions to the study of solitary oxygen dopant states in carbon nanotubes. Intentional incorporation of impurities and defects serves as a powerful tool to enable new materials functionality. Ma performed the first low temperature photoluminescence studies on individual oxygen-doped carbon nanotubes. This brought a deeper understanding of the electronic structure and chemical nature of these dopant states. Ma discovered a new solid-state approach for controlled incorporation of these dopant states. While the dopant states created via conventional solution chemistry exhibit photoluminescence fluctuation and bleaching, the states achieved via her solid-state approach can emit fluctuation-free photoluminescence emission over hours of continuous laser excitation. Ma performed the first quantum optical experiments on these ultra-stable dopant states and demonstrated room temperature single photon generation from them, which had been considered to be impossible for 1-dimensional carbon nanotubes. This discovery could start a new branch of study in the area of solitary dopant quantum optics and reinvigorate efforts on development of carbon nanotubes-based quantum light sources. The impact of her work spans from fundamental photophysics of carbon nanotubes to optoelectronic and quantum information processing technologies. Her research has led to three papers: ACSNano (published), Nature Nanotechnology (under review), and Nano Letters (submitted). She published another ACS Nano paper as the first author and has a paper under final review at Physical Review Letters. She has contributed to 2 other papers published in Small and Nano Letters. Ma is now a postdoc at CINT-Sandia. Han Htoon and Steve Doorn (MPA-CINT) nominated her.

-