Assistant Professor of Physics Raquel Queiroz Receives NSF Career Award

Raquel Queiroz, assistant professor of physics at Columbia University, has received a $600,000 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Quieroz, who joined Columbia in 2022, will use the award to support her theoretical research group’s work on topology.

Topology refers to the space that electrons can occupy as they move around a given material. No matter how much the material is stretched or twisted, its topology remains the same. But if topology could be broken, the world of those electrons would change. Electrons could then interact with each other in new ways, potentially giving rise to unique quantum properties, like superconductivity. 

But before they can investigate those theoretical properties, researchers first need better ways to understand topology and how they can break it. “We want to punch and perturb quantum materials to identify their topological features and figure out what we can do with them,” Queiroz said.

Queiroz joins a number of Columbians conducting quantum research who have received NSF CAREER awards, which provide multi-year support to early career researchers. In the past five years, computer scientist Henry Yuen, physicists Ana Asenjo Garcia and Sebastian Will, and chemists Timothy Berkelbach and Xavier Roy have each received the early-career recognition. 

The first step of Queiroz’s CAREER-supported project will be to develop new mathematical tools that can identify topological properties when a theoretical material is “disordered”—for example, if atoms that make up the material are missing or have been swapped with another element from the periodic table. The next step will be to characterize the implications of that disorder and how electrons in the material will behave as a result. 

Using those tools and theoretical insights, Queiroz and her group members will then develop guiding principles that can be applied to real materials, in the hopes of making elusive quantum behaviors, like superconductivity, a reality. “There are a lot of material databases out there,” Queiroz noted. “We want to find a quick way to identify those that are topological.”