Natasha Holmes has been named Ann S. Bowers Associate Professor, and Kin Fai Mak is the inaugural Josephson Family Professor. These professorships are possible because of generous gifts from alumni, parents and friends. Those gifts allow the College to replace retiring faculty, recruit stellar new faculty and recognize and retain mid-career and senior faculty to provide leadership across the disciplines and in areas of strategic importance.

Assistant Professor Debanjan Chowdhury is one of two LASSPers to receive a 2023 A&S New Frontier grant for a project. His project, titled “Probing dynamics of electronic quantum crystals on near-term quantum computers,” will study a special class of quantum magnets using noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing (NISQ) devices. 

Professor Itai Cohen is one of two LASSPers to receive a 2023 A&S New Frontier grant for a project. His project, titled “Strong Amphibious Robots,” seeks to build on the Cohen Group’s previous research on microscopic robots and origami metamaterials.

In a breakthrough for topological quantum computation, Google Quantum AI successfully observed the behavior of non-Abelion anyons for the first time ever. Despite being completely identical, when these particles are made to swap places, they retain a "memory" that makes it possible to tell that they've been swapped. And now this "memory" (along with other, even stranger behaviors) have been observed in a series of experiments. Eun-Ah Kim and former postdoc Yuri Lensky developed the protocol that allowed the team at Google Quantum AI to braid and manipulate the non-Abelian anyons.

Wang’s lab focuses on the motion, dynamics and mechanics of DNA; how DNA motor proteins collide and navigate through roadblocks; and DNA topology during transcription and replication. These highly complex problems require the development of real-time techniques to decipher the actions of multiple players, while also simultaneously allowing the ability to mechanically control, alter and measure DNA topology. Wang’s lab has pioneered several technologies that mimic DNA-based biological processes, including “DNA unzipping” and optical trapping. She joined the Cornell faculty in 1998; among her honors is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Award (1999-2001) and election to the American Physical Society in 2009.

Debanjan Chowdhury uses a variety of theoretical techniques to study and predict the quantum properties of trillions of interacting electrons in interesting materials, ranging from high-temperature superconductors to exotic magnets. His contributions have been recognized by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and by a Sloan research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.

A Cornell-led collaboration harnessed chemical reactions to make microscale origami machines self-fold – freeing them from the liquids in which they usually function, so they can operate in dry environments and at room temperature.

Using state-of-the-art magnetic imaging, a Cornell-led collaboration has for the first time characterized a key property of the superconducting state of a class of atomically thin materials that are too difficult to measure due to their minuscule size.

Some classical computers have error correction built into their memories based on bits; quantum computers, to be workable in the future, will need error correction mechanisms, too, based on the vastly more sensitive qubits. Cornell Professor Eun-Ah Kim and former Bethe/KIC/Wikins postdoctoral fellow Yuri Lensky (now at Google) have recently taken a step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing: they constructed a simple model containing exotic particles called non-Abelian anyons, compact and practical enough to run on modern quantum hardware. Realizing these particles, which can only exist in two dimensions, is a move towards implementing it in the real world.

A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions. The group’s paper, “Gate-Tunable Heavy Fermions in a Moiré Kondo Lattice,” published March 15 in Nature. The lead author is postdoctoral fellow Wenjin Zhao in the Kavli Institute at Cornell. The project was led by Kin Fai Mak, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in Cornell Engineering and in A&S, the paper’s co-senior authors. Both researchers are members of the Kavli Institute; they came to Cornell through the provost’s Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) initiative.