In 1990, a seminar was initiated for QMC (formerly CNAM/CSR) graduate students in order to present their research to the other students, postdocs, and faculty in the Center. In addition to fostering a rich, collaborative environment in which students learn about the breadth and scope of research being done in QMC, the idea of this series is to teach several crucial skills to our students:
1) How to present their research in a clear and time-efficient way to an audience that was not expert in their area of research;
2) How to best answer questions during their presentations;
3) How to ask good questions when in an audience (or interview), in particular about research beyond their own narrow PhD topic.
In this seminar, students submit formalized feedback to each weekly presenter, providing informative information about presentation style, research content and tips for improvement.
Best Speaker Awards
At the end of each term, a cash prize award is given for the best student and postdoc presentations based on class feedback scores. Previous winners are listed here:
2024 (fall) Jared Erb (student)
2023 (fall) Jared Erb (student), Peter Czajka (postdoc)
2022 (fall) Sungha Baek (student), Keenan Avers (postdoc)
2020 (fall) Shukai Ma
2019 (spring) Rui Zhang (student), Tarapada Sarkar (postdoc)
2018 (fall) Chris Eckberg (student), Jen-Hao Yeh (postdoc)
2015 Paul Syers, Jasper Drisko
2014 Sean Fackler, Paul Syers,
2013 Kevin Kirshenbaum, Kirsten Burson
2012 Baladitya Suri, Kristen Burson
2011 (fall) Sergii Pershoguba, Ted Thorbeck
2011 (spring) Anirban Gangopadhyay, Baladitya Suri
2010 (fall) Christian J. Long, Tomasz M. Kott
2010 (spring) Tomasz M. Kott, Kevin Kirshenbaum
2009 (fall) Arun Luykx, Jen-Hao Yeh
STM studies of the heavyfermion superconductor UTe2
Spin-tripletsuperconductivity is a condensate of electron pairs with spin-1 and anodd-parity wavefunction. A particularly interesting manifestation of tripletpairing is a chiral p-wave state which is topologically non-trivial and anatural platform for realizing Majorana edge modes. Triplet pairing is however rare in solidstate systems. The best-known example of chiral spin-triplet paring is thesuperfluid 3He-A phase and over the last few decades, there has beenan intensive search for potential spin-triplet superconductors in solid-statesystems. Since pairing is most naturally mediated by ferromagnetic spinfluctuations, uranium based heavy fermion systems containing f-electron elements that can harbor bothstrong correlations and magnetism are considered ideal candidate spin-tripletsuperconductors. In this work I will present scanning tunneling microscopy(STM) data on the newly discovered heavy fermion superconductor, UTe2with a TSC of 1.6 K. I will show signatures of coexistingKondo effect and superconductivity which show competing spatial modulationswithin one unit-cell. STM spectroscopyat step edges show signatures of chiral in-gap states, predicted to exist at the boundaries of a topologicalsuperconductor. Finally, I will discuss signatures of other co-existing phasesin this complex superconductor.