2023

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Location: Duncan Hall, Rice University

The Smalley-Curl Institute Summer Research Colloquium began in 1986 as the RQI Colloquium and has been held in August of each year. The purpose of the SCI Summer Research Colloquium is to provide undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers working at Rice with an opportunity to present their most recent work.

Presentations (either talks or posters) are formal, as in professional international conferences. However, the audience, consisting of Rice students and faculty members, as well as R&D representatives from local companies, is informal and friendly, which makes the Colloquium a great occasion for presenters to hone their communications skills.


Hanyu Zhu

Keynote Speaker

Hanyu Zhu
Assistant Professor, Materials Science and NanoEngineering
William Marsh Rice Chair

“Chiral phonons, a new route for quantum control”
Symmetry is an important concept in condensed matter. The term “chiral” has been applied in many different fields in physics and chemistry to describe the lack of certain symmetry, which leads to fascinating properties from selective interaction and unidirectional transport. The symmetry of non-chiral materials may be broken by the atomic motion of coherently excited “chiral phonons”. Instead of oscillating back and forth around their equilibrium positions, the atoms rotate and maintain a non-zero perturbation at all times to the electrons. Chiral phonons with quantized angular momentum are simply guaranteed by multifold rotational symmetry, and thus are rather common in materials and have been predicted to cause unexpected magnetic, topological, and transport phenomena. In this talk, I will first briefly introduce the history and recent progress of chiral phonon research. I will then introduce a possible classification of chiral phonons, which we tentatively named “Lugano test”, that connects various types of chirality with possible quantum control of functionalities. Finally, I will give the example of controlling spins in magnetic materials with chiral phonons that potentially lead to a new paradigm of dynamic structural-property relationship in quantum materials.

Sponsors

Program

Full program with abstracts (pdf)

8:00 am Breakfast and registration (Martel Hall)
8:55 am Introductory remarks (McMurtry Auditorium)

Oral session A (McMurtry Auditorium)
9:00 am – 10:00 am
Session Chair: Elijah Kritzell

9:00 am Aleida Machorro Ortiz “Solar Thermal Resonant Energy Exchange Desalination for Off-grid Brine Concentration”
9:12 am Wei Meng “Next-generation 2D Optical Strain Mapping with Strain-Sensing Smart Skin (S4)”
9:24 am Ziyang Wang “Measuring complex refractive index through deep-learning-enabled optical reflectometry”
9:36 am Jacques Doumani “Ordered Carbon Nanotube Assemblies with Synthetic Chirality”
9:48 am Rui Xu “Phonon Polaritonics in Broad Terahertz Frequency Range with Quantum Paraelectric SrTiO3”

Keynote

10:00 am Hanyu Zhu “Chiral phonons, a new route for quantum control”

Oral session B (McMurtry Auditorium)
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Session Chair: Kiran Muralidhar Kulkarni

11:00 am Wenjing Wu “Chip-scale Manufacturing of Highly Uniform Single Crystal 2D Materials”
11:12 am Tymofii Pieshkov “Phase transitions in thin films of WSe2 induced by the in situ heating”
11:24 am Ulises Felix Rendon “Observation of single T centers in silicon nanophotonic structures”
11:36 am Elijah Kritzell “Simulation of the Dicke Model in the Ultrastrong Coupling Regime Using Paramagnetic Spins”
11:48 am Haad Rathore “Large-scale, Longitudinal Neural Recordings Reveal Spatially Graded, Cell-Type Specific Plasticity Following Small-Scale Ischemic Strokes”

Lunch (Martel Hall)
12:00 pm – 1:00pm

Poster Session (Martel Hall)
1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Oral session C (McMurtry Auditorium)
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Session Chair: Will Smith

3:00 pm Chuqiao Shi “Four-dimensional Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (4D-STEM) on 2D Material and Nano Particles”
3:12 pm Tong Lin “Sub-wavelength, phase-sensitive microscopy of third-order nonlinearity in terahertz frequencies”
3:24 pm Yiyi Yang “A Novel Computational Approach for Predicting Colors in Van der Waals Layered 2D Materials: Implications for Material Characterization and Device Applications”
3:36 pm Dongjoo Lee “Novel Synthetic Approach to Degradable Bottlebrush Polymers with Tailored Side-chains”
3:48 pm Yigao Yuan “Photocatalytic steam methane reforming using a plasmonic Cu-Rh antenna-reactor photocatalyst”

Oral session D (McMurtry Auditorium)
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Session Chair: Adam Johnston

4:30 pm Kiheon Hong “Nickel Enhances InPd-Catalyzed Nitrate Reduction Activity and N2 Selectivity”
4:42 pm Sohail Dasgupta “Finite Temperature Quantum Matter with Rydberg or Molecule Synthetic Dimension”
4:54 pm Emilie Novak“Towards Sample-to-Answer HPV 16 and HPV 18 mRNA Detection for Assessing Cervical Cancer Risk”
5:06 pm Yuxiang Gao “Anomalous Hall effect in the antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetal SmAlSi ”
5:18 pm Yichen Zhang “Kramers nodal lines in SmAlSi and other ideal candidates, (Pb/In)TaX2 (X = S or Se)”

Award Ceremony and Dinner Cocktail (Martel Hall)
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Awards:

ORAL PRESENTATIONS
Platinum Award sponsored by Lakeshore ($500) - Emilie Novak (BIOE) “Towards Sample-to-Answer HPV 16 and HPV 18 mRNA Detection for Assessing Cervical Cancer Risk”
Gold Award sponsored by Lakeshore ($250) - Yichen Zhang (PHYS) “Kramers nodal lines in SmAlSi and other ideal candidates, (Pb/In)TaX2 (X = S or Se)”
Silver Award sponsored by Toptica ($200) - Chuqiao Shi (MSNE) “Four-dimensional Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (4D-STEM) on 2D Material and Nano Particles”
Bronze Award sponsored by Clarkson Aerospace ($150) - Tymofii Pieshkov (APP) “Phase transitions in thin films of WSe2 induced by the in situ heating”

POSTER PRESENTATIONS
Best Postdoc Poster Award sponsored by Toptica ($250) - Anupam Mondal (CHEM) “Nucleosome Breathing Facilitates the Search for Hidden DNA Sites by Pioneer Transcription Factors”

GRADUATE POSTERS
Platinum Award sponsored by Oxford ($300) - Christian Jacobson (CHEM) “Unusual Oxidation Behavior of Aluminum Nanocrystals”
Gold Award sponsored by Oxford ($250) - Jagriti Chatterjee (CHEM) “Optimizing Feature Selection and Hyperparameters in Machine Learning for Improved Single Particle Trajectory Classification”
Silver Award sponsored by Oxford ($200) - Zhenyang Jia (ChBE) “Stimuli-responsive Gating of Single Plasmonic Nanohybrids”
Bronze Award sponsored by Oxford ($150) - Romain Albouy (APP) “High-Precision Surgical Robot for Efficient Ultraflexible Nanoelectronic Threads Surgical Insertion”

UNDERGRADUATE POSTERS
Best Undergraduate Award sponsored by NEWT ($250) - Melinda Zhou (BIOE) “Design and validation of a 3D tissue engineered bone model to develop novel Ewing Sarcoma Therapeutics”
Runner-up Award sponsored by Clarkson Aerospace ($150) - Ananya Lingineni (BIOE) “A split and inducible adenine base editor for precise in vivo base editing”

People’s Choice Poster Award sponsored by Oxford ($100) - Gustavo Rodriguez Barrios (APP) “Terahertz Chiral Optics with Ordered Carbon Nanotube Architectures”