Signal:Noise welcomes a new DJ for their February 19 show!
Here’s the lineup:
Show begins at 9 p.m. (21+; No Cover) at Fly by Night
Assistant Professor Dien Nguyen has won an Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, an $875,000 investment in understanding how materials are arranged at the fundamental level.
Giving Order to the Universe
While a touchdown pass or a Smoky Mountain waterfall is a big (and splashy) display of physics in action, Nguyen’s work gets down to the microscopic scale—the nuts and bolts of matter. This is quantum physics, where predictions are difficult to make and events are hard to explain.
An atom is pretty complicated on its own, but its smaller components are even more complex. Inside there’s a nucleus comprising protons and neutrons (known together as nucleons). Nucleons are made up of still smaller particles called quarks, bound together by gluons. Then there’s spin, a fundamental property of nucleons. That’s what Nguyen studies, going a step beyond the basic building blocks of matter.
“It’s not just the building,” she said. “It’s fundamental structure. Spin is responsible for shaping the world—a provider of order and structure to the universe.”
Spin determines, for example, how materials are arranged, down to their most basic level. The more clearly scientists understand how that works, Nguyen said there’s greater potential to apply those findings to fields like materials science, medicine, and quantum computing. Despite its promise, identifying the origin of nucleon spin has been a longstanding challenge in nuclear physics. While physicists have studied both proton and neutron spin, the latter has gotten far less attention.
“Experimentally, neutron spin is way harder to study compared to proton spin,” Nguyen explained, adding that scientists need to understand both to get a clear picture of how matter is ordered. Her work is helping fill the gap by focusing on the neutron at the quark level.
By scattering electrons from a polarized Helium-3 target, Nguyen can provide high-precision data that helps her understand the quark’s internal structure and dynamics (including spin of its own) and how those influence what happens with nucleons. That information helps her map quark spin and how it in turn affects neutron spin.
“I’m bringing missing pieces,” she said. Once all is done, “we should have a much better understanding of the fundamental structure of matter.”
The DOE award will support this work, which includes collaborations with Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It will also help Nguyen bring her campus lab up to speed and hire a postdoc and a graduate student so that she can train young scientists in experimental nuclear physics.
A Grateful Vol
Mentoring is a skill Nguyen developed from her own experience. It’s also how she got interested in neutron spin studies.
“I was always interested in this challenging spin study, but did not get a chance to touch it until I went to MIT after my PhD,” she said.
When she was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science, her office was next door to that of Richard Milner, who co-authored a book about physicists’ quest to understand spin and the structure of matter. She began asking him questions about the research and eventually he asked if she wanted to work on a project with him.
“I’m on board,” she told him.
A self-described “hands-on person,” Nguyen said when Milner explained this kind of physics would require a target, she dove in. That was part of her work as a Nathan Isgur Fellow at JLab, where she began working with the Target Group. From there she accepted a bridge position between UT Physics and Jefferson Lab, becoming part of the university’s faculty in 2024.
Nguyen said she’s grateful for the guidance that’s helped define her path. She’s quick to name her advisors: Donal Day, Or Hen, Douglas Higinbotham, and many others, all of whom had different approaches. Some offered unconditional support while others pushed her by setting high standards and tight deadlines. She explained how James Maxwell welcomed her at Jefferson Lab and taught her “everything from the first step about target polarization,” while Milner opened “the bigger view and let you decide what you want to do.”
Taken together, she said, “it’s kind of a mix and really impacted my style of mentoring. I take pieces of that.”
That method has worked well for Nguyen. The UT Graduate Physics Society selected her as their Research Advisor of the Year for 2025.
“This is one of the more important awards for me because it makes me feel like I’m doing things right,” she said. “One of the reasons I wanted to be a professor is that I like to work with students and I like teaching. I put a lot of effort into that. When the students recognize that I care about them, that makes me really happy.”
She’s also not through learning herself. When she first arrived at UT in 2024, Professor Nadia Fomin showed her the ropes of faculty life.
“Nadia taught me a lot,” she said. “She’s a great mentor and I’m thankful to have her here. She took a lot of time on my (DOE Early Career Award proposal) draft and gave me feedback, and I really appreciate that. That was definitely an important piece for this award. I tell her that we won it, not that I won it.”
Nguyen’s success continues an upward trajectory for UT physics in bringing outstanding scientific talent to campus. This is the second DOE Early Career award for the department since 2022, when Associate Professor Tova Holmes won support for her research in elementary particle physics. The program supports outstanding scientists early in their careers whose work furthers DOE Office of Science research priorities.
Professor and Department Head Adrian Del Maestro explained that “Early Career Awards recognize only the brightest and most innovative junior faculty in the United States. Assistant Professor Nguyen is exemplary in terms of both her vision and the impact she has already had on our nuclear physics program. As a bridge faculty, she is representing UT at one of the country’s most elite scientific laboratories. We are excited to see what she will accomplish with this well-deserved award right at the beginning of her career in Knoxville!”
Nguyen said the physics faculty and staff have created a friendly atmosphere that makes coming to work a pleasure.
“I feel welcome when I’m here,” she said. “They make my life here much more beautiful.”
Every moment of every day, invisible particles from space pass silently through your body. Traveling to Earth at nearly the speed of light, cosmic rays are everywhere but detectable only through specialized tools. But now—thanks to a partnership that blends science with design—the public can see, hear, and feel the celestial phenomenon firsthand through an immersive exhibit created by interior architecture and physics students.
The multisensory installation—Cosmic Rayn: Seeing the Unseen—is the culmination of a yearlong project led by Assistant Professor of Physics Lawrence Lee and Professor David Matthews from the School of Interior Architecture. Funded by a $1 million National Science Foundation CAREER Award granted to Lee, the project reflects the university’s increasing emphasis on experiential learning, giving students the chance to turn classroom theory into real-world applications.
Read the rest of the story at the College of Architecture and Design website.
Biologically speaking, family stories are written in chromosomes. For the story to continue, those chromosomes have to be copied and passed on to the next generation. In recently published findings, UT’s biophysicists took a deeper look at how this works in Escherichia coli (E. coli) to better understand the process.
A Simple System with a Multi-Step Process
Chromosomes are long strands of DNA that wrap around proteins. A key part of a cell’s life cycle is chromosome replication and the transfer of genetic material to daughter cells. Professor Jaan Mannik’s and Adjunct Assistant Professor Max Lavrentovich’s groups wanted to understand how that mechanism is organized and carried out in bacteria (specifically E. coli).
“Chromosomes must be equally divided between the two daughter cells during cell division, otherwise the cell that lacks a full genome will die,” Mannik explained. “In human cells, the mitotic spindle is responsible for separating the chromosomes before cell division starts. However, bacteria lack a mitotic spindle. The question arises how the bacteria separate their chromosomes.”
He explained that “it is expected, based on polymer physics models, that two new DNA strands forming during replication in cylindrical confined conditions repel from each other due to an entropic force (entropic segregation mechanism).”
The Upside of Unmet Expectations
Graduate student Chathuddasie I. Amarasinghe (a first-time first author) took on the challenge to test this mechanism experimentally. She was joined by Graduate Student Mu-Hung Chang, who tackled the same question via modeling.
Using high-throughput fluorescence microscopy, Amarasinghe said the group imaged thousands of cells using microfluidic devices (also called lab-on-a-chip) in a single experiment.
“We take time-lapse images of our cells and then use MATLAB and Python functions to analyze the data in different ways, both quantitatively and qualitatively, including still images and movies,” she explained.
Amarasinghe said when she first created this new strain of cells with a fluorescent tag on ribosomes, she “expected it to produce very straightforward results that would match theoretical predictions from the entropic mechanism perfectly.”
That wasn’t exactly what happened.
Working on the experiment she learned of another model proposing how the dynamics of mRNA–ribosome complexes could affect DNA segregation. Messenger RNA copies genetic material from a DNA strand and carries that information to the ribosome, which makes proteins. Amarasinghe et al. found that once the replication process is roughly at the halfway point, the accumulation of messenger RNA and ribosomes in the middle of E. coli chromosomes becomes strong enough to start driving the two daughter DNA strands away from each other. This process continues past the point when the two chromosomes lose contact with each other and separate.
In parallel to this process, Amarasinghe and co-workers found that the daughter chromosomes are also separated by the closing constriction, a final “pinching” of the cell. During constriction the cell envelope bends inward and physically pushes the chromosomes apart.
The evolution of chromosome separation in E. coli. Top left: Diagram of an E. coli cell showing polysomes pushing sister chromosomes apart. Bottom: Heatmaps show cell-cycle-dependent changes in DNA and ribosome density distributions, and constriction formation. The top right corner shows normalized mid cell amounts from these heatmaps (integrated between the dashed horizontal lines).
Chang led development of the model, which used partial differential equations to describe the evolution of DNA, polyribosomes, and ribosomal subunits in E. coli cells.
The results of the experiment are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. PNAS is a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences covering the biological, physical, and social sciences. In addition to Amarasinghe (first author), Chang, Lavrentovich, and Mannik, other contributors are Jaana Mannik (a research scientist with UT Physics) and Scott T. Retterer of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Diving into Deep Questions
Biophysics captured Chang’s attention during his first year in the physics graduate program. Lavrentovich (then on UT’s faculty) introduced his work to new students, and Chang said “the mysterious phase transition patterns occurring in living beings attracted me.”
Within a couple of years, he joined the biophysics group.
“I started studying the organization pattern of E. coli DNA, which shows phase separation behavior between different species similar to some phase transition patterns Max showed before,” he said.
Chang defended his PhD dissertation this fall and will continue working with the Mannik group while applying for postdoctoral positions.
Amarasinghe came to biophysics a little earlier, taking a biophysics course as an undergraduate.
“For my undergraduate research, I developed antimicrobial packaging materials, which gave me hands-on experience with microbiology techniques that confirmed my interest in microbial research,” she said.
When she came to UT for graduate studies and learned of Mannik’s research, she was immediately interested in becoming part of the work.
“His research focuses on understanding how life self-organizes from seemingly simple components using the model organism E. coli, which is one of the deepest open questions in biology,” she said.
Women in Physics finished the semester December 3 with their fall WiP lunch. The goal of these meetings is to allow all interested physics undergraduate and graduate students, as well as post-docs and faculty, to exchange experiences and advice while enjoying great food.
The lunches have had departmental support for 20 years and keep breaking attendance records, with almost 50 participants for this latest event. The next meeting will be on May 7, 2026, with the aim to set a new record and keep building a strong physics community for anyone who wants to participate.
Alex Berry and Amelia Sandoval learn about physics in the classroom, but that’s just the beginning. They are two of 15 undergraduate physics majors contributing to and gaining from departmental research this year through the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program. These students get an early start seeing science in action while gaining needed experience for life after college—be that a job or an advanced degree.
Books and Building
Berry is a junior double-majoring in physics (BA track) and electrical engineering. He spent the fall 2025 term working with Professor Christine Nattrass in nuclear physics. He organized and formatted archival data so that it could be published, building a foundation for further studies.
“Through such, I have been able to build my strengths in programming and data allotment, which directly coincides across my academics,” he explained.
He said the most valuable asset of the program for him is “exposure of environment.”
With work-study, “I can discuss and work on problems that in many ways complement both of my academic pursuits quite splendidly,” he said. “The opportunities provided are quite extensive, and I am more than grateful for the ability to collaborate over them.”
His physics research ties nicely with Berry’s work as founder and president of Book to Build, the largest interdisciplinary student-led engineering organization at the university. Through events like workshops, tutoring, and internship preparation, they take ideas and concepts learned from the classroom (the book) to create and foster new ideas (the build).
Sandoval has been building as well. She has worked with Professor Nadia Fomin and Assistant Professor Dien Nguyen since spring 2024, when she was a freshman. Her main responsibility has been the establishment of a Helium-3 Metastability Exchange Optical Pumping (MEOP) polarization lab on campus: helping build the apparatus, learning the optical system, training to use Class 4 lasers and wire circuits, and learning how to write Labview code.
“This project is primarily concerned with developing a polarization technique to support target development for scattering experiments at (Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility),” she explained. “I am still working on that project, and have taken on a leadership role as well as presented my research at SESAPS 2025.”
While MEOP is her focus, she helps out with other experiments and has plans next summer to work on electron-ion collider detector testing with a collaboration including Los Alamos National Laboratory and CERN.
“This funding has allowed me to start undergraduate research early, and it has ensured that I have not had to take on a second job,” Sandoval explained. “I am so incredibly thankful for all of the opportunities that my incredible mentors have been able to give to me due to the funding that work-study provides. Without it, I do not believe that I would have been able to start research as early as I did. This work has been incredibly important to me, and I am excited for the future that it has opened up for me.”
Getting Everyone on Board
Cheryl Huskey is responsible for the department’s success in aligning students with work-study opportunities. As the Undergraduate Administrative Associate, she gets them on the right track to meaningful research experiences, including anticipating and answering their questions.
“Students often think work-study is automatically awarded or guaranteed, when in reality they must qualify through their FAFSA and have remaining financial need,” she explained. “Another common misconception is that work-study positions are assigned. Instead, students must actively apply and interview for available roles. (They) also sometimes think work-study funds are paid upfront, but the funds are earned through hours worked and received in regular paychecks.”
Huskey helps students navigate every step of the process, from understanding eligibility and connecting them with available positions to supporting them as they transition into their research roles.
“Throughout their employment, I help with onboarding tasks, timesheets, and any questions about expectations or scheduling,” she said. “We also collaborate closely with supervisors to ensure students have a positive, productive experience and gain practical skills.”
More than half of the undergraduates participating in physics research are supported by work-study funding. Huskey said there is no limit to how many work-study students the department can employ, as long as they are eligible for the program and there are appropriate roles available.
She also laid out a helpful checklist for interested students:
Tova Holmes and Yang Zhang have won the department’s first-ever Haslam Family Professorships, an investment that recognizes their past successes and deepens the impact of their future research and teaching.
The university’s Office of the Provost awards these honors in recognition of the recipients’ achievements in research, scholarship, and creative activity. Currently seven faculty members across the Knoxville campus hold these professorships. For both Holmes and Zhang, the five-year appointment began August 1, with the possibility of continuation past 2030.
Holmes is an associate professor who joined the department in 2020. She’s an experimentalist working in elementary particle (high energy) physics and has won a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Award, the university’s first-ever Cottrell Scholar Award, and a Sloan Research Fellowship, among other honors.
Zhang joined the department in 2023. An assistant professor, he’s a theorist in condensed matter physics focusing on quantum materials and artificial intelligence (AI). In 2024 he won the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Early Career Scientist Prize in Computational Physics.
“This marks the first time (the Haslam Professorships) have been bestowed within our department, an exciting and well-deserved recognition of Tova’s and Yang’s remarkable accomplishments in high energy physics and quantum materials, respectively,” said Professor and Department Head Adrian Del Maestro. “These awards reflect the strong advocacy of Divisional Dean Kate Jones and Executive Dean R.J. Hinde, who worked with the Provost’s Office to implement a key recommendation from our recent Academic Program Review: that we do more to celebrate the outstanding contributions of our junior faculty.”
Small Things with Big Impact
Holmes is particularly gratified about the options the Haslam Professorship provides.
“Having a named professorship is a great honor just on its face, but it comes with extremely flexible funds that I can spend how I think will most benefit my program,” she said. “If a student has an amazing result that I want to make sure they can show off, I can send them to a conference. I can buy new equipment. I can do whatever I think is most useful to my group at the time and that is such a rarity. It lets you do these smaller things that can really have a big impact. It has an impact on your impact.”
Holmes’s research is firmly rooted in established science with an eye on the horizon. Her group works with the Compact Muon Solenoid detector program at CERN, a longstanding experiment that’s a DOE priority. They’re building a new hardware system that will reconstruct, in real time, every track from every particle that comes flying out of the particle collisions at the upgraded High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, which will turn on in 2029. She’s also collaborating with scientists at Fermilab to study dark matter signatures and has become a leader in the effort to build a muon collider, part of the nation’s particle physics roadmap for the future.
While Holmes’s work dives into the particles and forces that compose and corral matter, Zhang looks at the complexities and promise of new materials, building a broad program across departments.
“Right now, I am most enthusiastic about the rapidly advancing intersection of quantum materials and artificial intelligence,” he said. “My group is developing new computational methods to understand and predict the behavior of complex quantum systems at a scale that was previously impossible.”
His team is particularly focused on moiré materials, which have atomically thin layers that are arranged slightly askew. The interactions between those layers give rise to new properties.
“We’ve discovered that you can create entirely new electronic properties just by twisting two-dimensional semiconductors,” Zhang explained. “This research is fundamentally interdisciplinary and (is) creating a new synergy between computational physics, computer science, and materials science. As I discussed at the Symposium on Machine Learning in Quantum Chemistry held in Knoxville, my work is a perfect example of this. We use high-level physics principles and data from smaller, exact calculations to train advanced machine learning models. These models then learn the complex quantum rules and interactions that govern materials.”
Outpacing the Textbooks
For Holmes and Zhang, thriving research spills over into their classrooms.
“I’m teaching particle physics right now, which is an utter delight,” Holmes said.
When she first joined the faculty, getting back to the classroom helped reacquaint her with concepts she learned as an undergraduate and tie them to her current elementary particle pursuits.
“I am so glad to be at a university where I’m teaching, because it’s my job to constantly refresh and expand my understanding of the underlying elegance of particle physics and the fundamental principles underpinning it,” she said. “I’ve been able to make more connections between my work and other fields in particle physics. I love being able to incorporate ideas from research into classes.”
Zhang’s research also heavily influences what and how his students learn.
“My research and teaching are deeply intertwined,” he said. “This field is moving so quickly that the most exciting topics, whether it’s AI in physics or the discovery of new quantum materials, are not in the standard textbooks yet. I bring these frontier problems directly into the classroom. When my research group develops a new computational tool, I often turn that into a lab module or a final project for my students. This gives them hands-on experience with the exact methods that are driving discovery today. My goal is to not just teach them established physics but to train them as the next generation of computational scientists who are fluent in physics, math, and AI.”
Long before winning a Haslam Professorship, Holmes was aware of what the name meant for education.
“I understand that as governor Bill Haslam did a lot to increase access to the University of Tennessee for the students of the state,” she said. “I really respect that effort and it was something I was impressed by when I arrived in Tennessee; what an incredible set of programs there were to give access to the university to everybody in the state. That’s a thing I’m very pleased to have attached to the name of this.”
For Zhang, the honor is inspiration to keep doing good work.
“This kind of support from the Haslam family is truly transformative,” he said. “A named professorship like this feels like a holistic recognition of one’s overall contributions; not just a single project, but the entirety of my research, teaching, and service to the department and the university. It is less about what you will do and more about an investment in how you work and your potential as a faculty member. That is incredibly meaningful and encouraging.”
Zhang also sees these named professorships as a reflection of the department’s upward trajectory and its collaborative culture.
“I want to thank Adrian Del Maestro and all my colleagues for making this department such an innovative place to be,” he said. “Most of all, this honor is a credit to the brilliant students and postdocs I am lucky to work with every day.”
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, expects to receive $2.3 million to play a key role in the nation’s quantum future, thanks to renewed funding for the Quantum Science Center (QSC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
The U.S. Department of Energy is investing $125 million in QSC over the next five years to pioneer quantum-accelerated high-performance computing (QHPC), developing open-source software for quantum-classical workflows that accelerate scientific advancements across multiple disciplines. Since its founding in 2018 as part of the National Quantum Initiative Act, the QSC has pooled the unique strengths of national laboratories, industry partners, and academia to build a combined research program in quantum science. UT is part of that collaboration and will receive $2.3 million to lead work in materials and models and to train early-career scientists.
With its commitment to innovation gateways in Advanced Materials and Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence, the university is well-positioned for this assignment. In 2023, UT launched the Center for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (CAMM), a premier Materials Research Science and Engineering Center funded by the National Science Foundation. Through experiment, synthesis, and modeling, CAMM is dedicated to discovering advanced materials for new quantum technologies and giving students the opportunity to learn in a world-class environment.
UT is a world leader in quantum spin systems and brings its unique expertise to the validation of quantum-classical computations, which are beyond the reach of conventional computation.
Physics Professor Alan Tennant is the CAMM Director.
“UT is a key part in this,” he said of QSC research. He explained that “machine learning to extract models from quantum magnets has been an important innovation from UT and CAMM, allowing parameters to be determined from materials with neutron scattering which are essential for validating quantum computations. QSC will continue to strengthen its collaboration with CAMM.”
He added that this new funding will also support UT students who will make materials, conduct neutron experiments, and undertake quantum computations.
Tennant said the QSC is building the country’s foundation for a new quantum age and that the university’s involvement puts UT at the center of that work.
“This is actually right in the heart of where tech starts connecting,” he said. “We are integral to the American road map.”
The QSC is headquartered at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is managed by UT-Battelle for the DOE Office of Science. By uniting national laboratories, academic institutions and industry partners, the QSC endeavors to advance American innovation and global leadership by enhancing the computational robustness, algorithmic scalability and simulation accuracy of quantum computing systems. For more information, visit qscience.org.
Two UT Physics Joint Faculty Professors have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS), an honor that recognizes excellence in physics and exceptional service to the physics community.
An-Ping Li leads the Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Group and the Heterogeneities in Quantum Materials Theme at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He was recognized for pioneering contributions to multiprobe and spin-sensitive scanning tunneling microscopy that enable groundbreaking advances in understanding and control of atomic defects, interfaces, and precision synthesis.
Bronson Messer is Director of Science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at ORNL. The Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public elected him a Fellow for conveying the excitement and universal impact of physics to students, teachers, professionals, and the public via talks, multimedia, laboratory tours, popular national events, and for direct outreach to underserved Appalachian students and teachers.
Joint faculty appointments broaden opportunities for research collaborations and mentorship, allowing students to pursue master’s- and doctoral-level research at national laboratories. When Li joined ORNL as a research associate he began working with Physics Professor Hanno Weitering. After establishing himself as an independent researcher at the national laboratory, he developed a research program with the university as a joint faculty member and has mentored seven postdoctoral fellows from UT, including Wonhee Ko (who’s now an assistant professor). Messer has been the primary advisor for three UT Physics graduate students and has co-supervised eight others. He’s also a departmental alumnus, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1991 and a PhD in 2000. He translates that experience into the outreach that made him an APS Fellow.
“I think I was lucky to have ‘landed’ in the department as an undergraduate,” Messer said. “I had no idea what college or science or research was about. At all. I got excellent training, and I’m very interested in making sure that students who sound like me and might be just as bewildered get a feel for science being a process and a discipline, rather than being some secret writ.”
Affiliated faculty’s contributions to advancing physics research, training next-generation scientists, and inspiring public interest amplify the department’s impact in meeting the university’s land-grant mission and aspirations. This new class of APS Fellows joins 10 full-time physics faculty who have earned the honor, along with four Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Assistant Professor Joon Sue Lee has won a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance the creation of quantum materials for new quantum devices. He is the ninth member of the current physics faculty to win this award and one of three recent UT recipients.
Atomic-Scale Engineering
The NSF CAREER program supports early-career faculty with the potential to be academic role models in research and education. Since joining the department in 2020, Lee has won back-to-back teaching awards and built a research group that specializes in developing quantum materials, especially those with potential applications in quantum technologies.
The transistors and semiconductors that power smartphones and biosensors were built on understanding electrical properties. Future quantum technologies rely on the fascinating but atypical workings of quantum mechanics. In systems so small they’re measured in atoms, the physics tends to go off script. Particles can be in multiple states at the same time or they may be entangled. Properties don’t exist until they’re measured. Lee’s work navigates through this landscape to make new materials and devices for a modern world. With this NSF support, he’ll focus on a single-element material—tin (Sn)—because it has a dramatically different personality.
“Tin has two different structures,” he said. “Alpha phase is topological. Beta phase is superconducting. If you can control the growth of each phase, then you can control the electrical properties.”
Superconductivity allows electrical current to flow with no resistance. Topological phases, on the other hand, are defined by the global arrangement of a material’s electronic wavefunctions—its band topology. In conventional materials, the conduction and valence bands remain distinct. However, in topological materials, these bands can invert due to strong spin-orbit coupling.
“This inversion changes the material’s topological order, creating protected surface or edge states that allow electrons to travel without scattering,” Lee explained.
Such states are remarkably robust against defects and impurities, giving rise to exotic behaviors that bridge fundamental quantum physics and potential device applications. Combining superconductivity and topology gives scientists exciting opportunities for new technologies.
“Topological superconductivity, for example, is one of the most promising routes toward quantum computing,” Lee said. “That’s one of the big motivations.”
Using the Molecular Beam Epitaxy resources at UT’s Institute for Advanced Materials, Lee grows thin films, one layer of atoms at a time, on crystalline substrates. His goal is to selectively grow pure superconducting and topological phases of tin and put them together into structures with “atomically precise” interfaces.
“If we can achieve that, then we will be able to design materials where one area has one structure and the adjacent area has the second structure,” he said.
By adjusting the lattice parameters of underlying buffer layers of those areas, he can tune the tin phases and control their electrical properties.
“We want to explore the basic physics in these electrical states,” he said, “and also develop devices that could lead to future quantum applications.”
Professor and Department Head Adrian Del Maestro said that “Lee’s work harnesses the quantum behavior of materials for new technologies, including novel superconductors that can be used for sensing and energy applications. His lab is always bustling with undergraduate and graduate students, where he is training the workforce of tomorrow.”
The work aligns well with the university’s strategic focus on advanced materials and manufacturing innovation gateway, part of a concentrated effort to make the most of UT’s expertise to tackle grand challenges. Lee, who has won teaching awards from the College of Arts and Sciences and the UT Alumni Association, also plans to share this research with undergraduates to inspire a new generation of scientists.
“I plan to use the data from our samples to explain or demonstrate superconductivity or topological properties in class,” he said. He added that he can also use semiconductors and insulators in his lab and “those can help students understand electrical properties of different materials.”
Lee’s five-year project began in August and includes $749,441 to support his work. He is the ninth member* of the current physics faculty to win an NSF CAREER award. The program has supported the department’s wide range of expertise, including research in condensed matter, elementary particles, biophysics, and nuclear theory.
*Adrian Del Maestro, Steven Johnston, Larry Lee, Jian Liu, Norman Mannella, Jaan Mannik, Lucas Platter, and Haidong Zhou have all won NSF CAREER Awards.
Graduate Student Pradip Adhikari joined Joon Sue Lee’s research group in the fall of 2020 and is one of 11 graduate students to win a Graduate Advancement, Training, and Education (GATE) Award for the 2025-2026 academic year. These awards from the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute’s Science Alliance support collaborative research between the university and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, providing outstanding graduate students with a 12-month appointment including a stipend, tuition, and benefits.
While he isn’t working directly on the NSF CAREER research, Lee explained that “in Pradip’s case, he’s using a different material system (but) it’s the same motivation; the same big idea about topological materials and superconductivity.”
Adhikari’s project is the device-scale interplay of unconventional superconductivity and magnetism. While they typically have an adversarial relationship (usually leading to the suppression of one state by the other) he is working with a combination of iron, tellurium, and selenium, or FeTeSe, which is a notable example of an unconventional superconductor with co-existing superconductivity and magnetism.
“The interplay of topology, magnetism, and superconductivity gives rise to exotic and robust quantum states, making such materials a fertile ground for discovering new physics,” Adhikari said. “My research interest lies in the synthesis of high-quality topological materials, fabricating devices from them, and studying their properties at the device scale. I am particularly excited by how the unique electronic behaviors of these materials can be explored and harnessed for next-generation quantum technologies.”
