Yohannes Abate, professor of physics at the University of Georgia, said he has always been interested in physics. “I don’t remember a time when I was not intrigued by gravity, for example, or small particles or the stars,” he said.
Abate, who has a doctorate in physics, and graduate student Alireza Fali recently played a key role in the groundbreaking development of a new one-step process for creating self-assembled metamaterials, which are materials that are engineered to have properties that do not occur in nature. This discovery could have wide applications in electronics and optical devices, according to an article shared by the UGA Physics Department.
The University of Georgia is home to the Abate Quantum Nano Optics Lab, where samples are sent from around the world to be examined by Abate and his team of researchers.
With their specialized instruments and training, researchers in Abate’s lab are able to examine materials at a much smaller scale than most other laboratories in the world.
“Not many people can do what we do,” Abate said. “People send us samples to look at because at a much smaller scale, things are very different.”
Abate and his team use terahertz, infrared and optical spectroscopy at very high spatial resolution to explore fundamental nanoscale physical phenomena and interactions in nano and quantum materials, according to the lab’s website. These are common techniques used by physicists to examine two-dimensional materials, which are very thin materials whose size varies from only a few nanometers to a few micrometers.
Abate said the new discovery came about when collaborators at the University of Minnesota grew a sample of a material called strontium stannate and sent it to Abate’s lab to be examined.
Abate said that after close inspection of this thin film material, they noticed a repeating structure at the nano scale. The formation resembled patterns produced by costly multi-step processes, according to the article shared by the UGA Physics Department.
Abate said it’s difficult to predict the implications of this development, but it could have wide applications in nanophotonics and nano-optics.
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