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Lukas Muechler

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and of Physics
Lukas Muechler
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Lukas Muechler

Education

Flatiron Research Fellow, Center for Computational Quantum Physics, New York

Ph.D. in Chemistry, Princeton University

Diplom in Chemistry, Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz

Honors and Awards

Princeton Honorific Fellowship: Procter Fellowship

Princeton Chemistry Teaching Award

Stephen P.A. Fodor *85 Fellowship

National Scholarship Program of the German Federal Government

Publications

Google scholar page 

Research highlights and recent publications

I) Development of a chemical theory of Topological Insulators and Dirac Semimetals. Use of chemical concepts to aid discovery of new materials. Established connection between chemical stability rules and the physics of strongly interacting systems. New model of a strongly interacting symmetry protected topological phase and topological classification of chemical reactions.

  1. Muechler, L. Topological classification of molecules and chemical reactions with a perplectic structure. Phys. Rev. B 101, 045123 (2020).
  2. Chen, C., Muechler, L., Car, R., Neupert, T. & Maciejko, J. Fermionic Symmetry-Protected Topological Phase in a Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model. Phys. Rev. Lett., 096405 (2016).
  3. Gibson, Q., Schoop, L., Muechler, L., Xie, L., Hirschberger, M., Ong, N., Car, R. & Cava, R. Three-Dimensional Dirac Semimetals: Design Principles and Predictions of New Materials. Phys. Rev. B. 91, 205128 (2015).
  4. Muechler, L., Maciejko, J., Neupert, T. & Car, R. Möbius Molecules and Fragile Mott Insulators. Phys. Rev. B 90, 245142 (2014).
  5. Muechler, L., Zhang, H., Chadov, S., Yan, B., Casper, F., Kübler, J., Zhang, S. & Felser, C. Topological Insulators from a Chemist’s Perspective. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51, 7221 (2012).

II) Development of a theory of the anomalous Hall effect in Heusler compounds: Interplay of topology and crystalline symmetries. Discovery of new magnetic Weyl semimetals with large anomalous Hall effects. Prediction of quantum anomalous Hall effect in thin films of Co3Sn2S2 (signatures recently reported in experiment [arXiv:1910.11205]). 

  1. Muechler, L., Liu, E., Gayles, J., Xu, Q., Felser, C. & Sun, Y. Emerging chiral edge states from the confinement of a magnetic Weyl semimetal in Co3Sn2S2. Phys. Rev. B 101, 115106 (2020).
  2. Liu, E., Sun, Y., Muechler, L., Sun, A., Jiao, L., Kroder, J., SüSS, V., Borrmann, H., Wang, W., Schnelle, W., Wirth, S., Goennenwein, S. T. B. & Felser, C. Giant anomalous Hall effect in a ferromagnetic kagome-lattice semimetal. Nat. Phys. 14, 1125 (2018).
  3. Manna, K., Muechler, L., Kao, T.-H., Stinshoff, R., Zhang, Y., Gooth, J., Kumar, N., Kreiner, G., Koepernik, K., Car, R., et al. From colossal to zero: controlling the anomalous Hall effect in magnetic Heusler compounds via Berry curvature design. Phy. Rev. X 8, 041045 (2018). 

III) Discovery of new topological semimetal states in presence of non-symmorphic symmetries. Topological classification of non-symmorphic band structures and application to monolayer WTe2 and ZrSiTe.

  1. Muechler, L., Topp, A., Queiroz, R., Krivenkov, M., Varykhalov, A., Cano, J., Ast, C. R. & Schoop, L. M. Modular Arithmetic with Nodal Lines: Drumhead Surface States in ZrSiTe. Phys. Rev. X 10, 011026 (2020). 
  2. Ok, S., Muechler, L., Di Sante, D., Sangiovanni, G., Thomale, R. & Neupert, T. Custodial glide symmetry of quantum spin Hall edge modes in monolayer WTe2. Phys. Rev. B 99, 121105 (2019). 
  3. Muechler, L., Alexandradinata, A., Neupert, T. & Car, R. Topological Nonsymmorphic Metals from Band Inversion. Phy. Rev. X 6, 041069 (2016)