Enabling Quantum Leap: Convergent Approach to the Challenges of Moore's Law

National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research, Condensed Matter Physics Program Workshop

Georgetown University, Washington, DC

Nov. 13-15, 2018

Workshop Goals and Objectives

The goal of this workshop is to highlight scientific opportunities that can address the energy challenges in nanoelectronics in general, as symbolized by the coming end of Moore's law. This is an emerging frontier of research in Condensed Matter and Materials Physics. Some representative opportunities include the following:

  • Spintronic materials that allow energy-efficiently control of spin by other degrees of freedom, such as charge, orbit, heat, light, and strain, and vice versa, leading to a host of emerging opportunities in spin-orbitronics, spincaloritronics, all-optical switching, straintronics, etc.
  • Valleytronics that utilizes the valley degree of freedom for information storage, and quantum manipulation of valleys in semiconductors.
  • Topological materials, such as topological insulators and superconductors, that provide an ideal platform for explorations of low power electronics based on the dissipationless edge channels of the quantum spin Hall state.
  • Quantum information / computation that could be a potential game-changer. For example, Majorana fermion modes and their non-Abelian braiding properties can be potentially utilized to implement topological qubits in fault-tolerant quantum computation.
  • Multiferroic materials with simultaneous ferroelectricity and magnetism that provide a pathway to achieving strong magnetoelectric coupling with efficient voltage control of magnetism, leading to compact and power efficient electric-field tunable magnetic devices.
  • Quantum materials that have exciting potentials for quantum sensing and communication with ultra-small cost, size, weight, and power (C-SWAP). Research areas include light sources, sensors, detectors, frequency conversion, filters, multiplexers, etc.
  • Topological excitations such as magnetic skyrmions that offer exciting new mechanisms for low dissipation information storage, due to their topologically protected quantum states.
  • Ionics that utilizes ionic transport across interfaces to tailor the interfacial characteristics and consequently the physical and chemical properties, leading to fascinating opportunities in memristors, magneto-ionics, electrolyte-gated materials. They are also highly relevant to neuromorphic computation.

The workshop will highlight the latest progresses in these diverse directions, identify major hurdles, milestones, metrics, as well as opportunities, and facilitate interactions across traditional research boundaries. It will also address research infrastructure needs and workforce development. It will be held over a three-day period at the Georgetown University over Nov. 13-15, 2018.

Due to limited space, workshop participation is by invitation only, from the organizers and NSF. Confirmed participants include:

  • Andrew Antonelli (Nanometrics)
  • Paola Barbara (Georgetown Univ.)
  • Collin Broholm (Johns Hopkins Univ. )
  • An Chen (SRC)
  • Paul Crowell (Univ. of Minnesota)
  • Albert Davydov (NIST)
  • Jim Freericks (Georgetown Univ. )
  • Mark Gyure (HRL Laboratories)
  • Axel Hoffmann (Argonne National Lab)
  • Jeanie Lau (Ohio State Univ. )
  • David Lederman (UC Santa Cruz)
  • Chris Leighton (Univ. of Minnesota)
  • Norman Mannella (Univ. of Tennessee)
  • Hanhee Paik (IBM)
  • Petr Plechac (Univ. of Delaware)
  • Ramamoorthy Ramesh (UC Berkeley)
  • Caroline Ross (MIT)
  • Nitin Samarth (Penn State Univ. )
  • John Schaibley (Univ. of Arizona)
  • Jing Shi (UC Riverside)
  • Mark Stiles (NIST)
  • Steven Vitale (MIT)
  • Jianping Wang (Univ. of Minnesota)
  • Kang L. Wang (UCLA)
  • Weigang Wang (Univ. of Arizona)
  • Zhenghan Wang (Microsoft)
  • Barry Zink (Univ. of Denver)
  • Kai Liu (Georgetown Univ., host)