Columbia’s materials center wins NSF funding for a third time

Columbia University has secured $18 million in National Science Foundation funding, marking the third time since 2014 the institution has won a competitive Materials Research Science and Engineering Center grant. This year, the NSF awarded only six such grants from approximately 20 university-led centers nationwide.

Under the direction of Colin Nuckolls, the new center will focus on a critical challenge in modern technology: “moving and processing information without wasting energy,” according to Columbia’s executive vice president for research, Jeannette Wing. Researchers will build on prior discoveries to develop advanced electronic materials for semiconductors and quantum devices over the next six years.

Columbia’s Third MRSEC: Focus on Advanced Electronic Materials

This latest award for the Advanced Electronic Materials (AEM) center arrives in a competitive environment where only six such grants were distributed this year from roughly twenty university-led centers nationwide. The continued investment underscores Columbia’s position as a leader in materials research and its ability to consistently propose innovative, high-impact projects. The new center, directed by Sheldon and Dorothea Buckler Professor of Material Science Colin Nuckolls, will concentrate on fundamentally altering how information is processed, aiming to minimize energy waste in electronic devices.

Jeannette Wing, Columbia’s executive vice president for research, explained the core challenge driving this work: “Every six years, we must compete against the strongest materials research teams in the country, and to win, we have to reinvent ourselves around fundamentally new science.” Researchers involved with the AEM center will operate across two interdisciplinary groups, one investigating semiconductors for coherent charge-neutral information flow and the other designing non-equilibrium quantum metamaterials. The semiconductor group, led by Aravind Devarakonda and David Reichman, intends to move beyond traditional electronics where electrical charge transmission inherently generates heat.

“Modern electronics move information by pushing electrical charge through materials, and every step of that journey wastes energy as heat,” said Devarakonda. “We are designing materials in which information instead rides on coherent, charge-neutral waves.” If we can convert between light, electrical signals, and these excitations inside a single material, we open a path to information processing without the losses that limit today’s devices.

The second group, under James McIver and Andrew Millis, will explore manipulating materials’ electromagnetic environments to create novel quantum states. “Ordinarily, you are stuck with the quantum phases a material offers you at equilibrium,” McIver stated. “By surrounding these materials with engineered electromagnetic environments, such as optical cavities, we can coax them into states that have no natural counterpart—from modified superconductivity to new topological phases—and establish the design rules to create them on demand.” The AEM center’s impact extends beyond scientific advancement; it is also committed to fostering the next generation of STEM professionals.

Building on the success of its predecessor, the PAQM center, which graduated 29 graduate students and launched five start-up companies, the new center will continue existing educational programs and introduce new initiatives, including a pre-college materials science course and a mini-research experience for teachers. Nuckolls concluded, “A center like this is bigger than any single discovery.

Over the next six years, this center will help train the scientists and engineers the country needs—from high school students working beside us at the New York Hall of Science to the graduate students and postdocs who will go on to lead labs, launch companies, and build the next generation of electronics. That is what these centers are for, and it is why you have to earn one all over again every six years.”

PAQM Center Advances: 2D Materials and Superatom Creation

Columbia University’s sustained success in materials science research was affirmed with an $18 million grant from the National Science Foundation, marking the third consecutive MRSEC award since 2014. The PAQM center pioneered work with two-dimensional materials and superatoms, laying the groundwork for the AEM’s ambitious goals. Two-dimensional materials, created by peeling away single-atom-thick layers from larger crystals, offered researchers a platform to engineer novel properties like superconductivity and unique magnetism through careful layering and twisting.

Simultaneously, the PAQM team created superatoms, clusters of atoms behaving as a single atomic entity, with graphullerene representing a notable example of a new carbon form. “In the PAQM, we learned to assemble quantum materials with atomic precision and tune their properties almost at will,” explained Xiaoyang Zhu, associate director of the new center. This expertise will now be applied to address challenges in semiconductor development and quantum computing.

Researchers at the AEM center intend to move beyond traditional electronics by exploring coherent, charge-neutral waves for information transmission, seeking to minimize energy loss, a significant drawback of conventional systems where electrons dissipate energy as heat. The other group, under the direction of James McIver and Andrew Millis, will investigate quantum metamaterials, materials engineered to manipulate light and enhance properties like superconductivity and topological states, potentially reducing error rates in quantum computers.

The new AEM center is ready to address some of the most profound questions in materials science and engineering: how to transport information as coherent waves and how to tune quantum materials with light,” Zhu added. This commitment to training future scientists and engineers underscores the center’s broader impact beyond specific research breakthroughs.