Materials Science Research Lecture

**Refreshments at 3:45pm outside Noyes 153

Abstract:

One of the apparent difficulties for New Materials Physics is how to identify promising phase spaces to explore or study. In essence, with hundreds of thousands of possible compounds (known and unknown) to consider, how can promising materials be discovered? The design and discovery of new strongly correlated electron systems or quantum materials is essentially a negotiation with Nature. As with any negotiation, it is important to be as flexible as possible while still holding on to the key points that are vital. In this talk I will try to illustrate how desires can be translated into specific new materials growth efforts. For example, how "wanting a low degeneracy, topological non-trivial compound that we could readily study with ARPES" can lead directly to the identification and study of RhBi2. Another example is how a desire to discover new quantum critical materials can be translated into searches near collapsed tetragonal phase transitions or the study of ternary compounds that include an immiscible pair of elements. NOTE: one of the goals of this talk is to provide my theoretical colleagues some insight into how experimentalists translate complex theoretical ideas into very primitive attempts to shave the dice in this cosmic game of craps.

More about the Speaker:

Paul C. Canfield, Ph.D., graduated, suma cum laude, with a B.S. in physics from the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) in 1983. He received his M.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also received his Ph.D. in 1990, having researched experimental condensed matter physics. From 1990 to 1993, Dr. Canfield was a postdoctoral researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, working with Drs. Joe Thompson and Zachary Fisk. In 1993, Dr. Canfield joined the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University (Ames). Since then, he has become a senior physicist in at the laboratory a Distinguished Professor of Physics, at the university, holding the Robert Allen Wright Professorship. Dr. Canfield's research is centered on the design, discovery, growth and characterization of novel electronic and magnetic materials. He has made key contributions to the fields of superconductivity, heavy fermions, quantum criticality, quasicrystals, spin glasses, local-moment metamagnetism, and metal-to-insulator transitions. Dr. Canfield has helped to educate and train researchers in experimental, new-materials-physics throughout the world, emphasizing the need to tightly couple growth (often in single crystal form) and measurement of new materials. Dr. Canfield is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). He was awarded the 2011 Department of Energy Lawrence Award for Condensed Matter Physics. In 2014, Dr. Canfield was awarded the APS David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics, and was named a Gordon and Betty Moore Materials Synthesis Investigator. In 2015, he received the Humboldt Research Award. In 2017 he received the James C. McGroddy Prize in New Materials from the APS. In 2020 he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.