Faculty Spotlight
Edwin Huang
South Bend doesn’t have very much traffic, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Edwin Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy hails from, traffic is a daily battle.
Traffic, he described, isn’t dissimilar to condensed matter physics. Huang joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame this year. His research uses numerical and analytical techniques to study properties of quantum materials—and that’s where his correlation with traffic begins, with the “many-body phenomena.”
A single car or a few cars will go the speed limit, and operate independently, but when there are many cars on the road, the entire behavior of the traffic changes. They slow down and speed up for no reason.
“We try to study the same thing with electrons in materials, how behavior changes as a function of electron density strain on a system, or temperature change, for example,” Huang said. Changing these parameters can result in different phases of metals: superconductors, magnets, and materials with other properties.
Full story here.