2025: Year of Quantum
How physics at the smallest scales impacts materials, human health, computing, communications and more
“Building a quantum information highway network with topological edge states”
Presented by Jun Zhu
Professor of Physics
March 1, 2025
100 Thomas Building
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Electronics built with semiconductor technologies —vtransistors and integrated circuits — have had tremendous societal impact in the past decades. The advent of the quantum era, however, requires the development of new materials and paradigms. This is because the preservation of quantum coherence and quantum entanglement is essential to the operation of quantum devices, and classical scaling solutions, such as the copper interconnect layers used in any integrated circuit, no longer work. As quantum computers grow rapidly in size, the development of the quantum equivalent of the classical interconnects remains an open challenge. A network built with a special type of ballistic, one-dimensional quantum wires called edge states may offer a solution. In this lecture, Zhu will discuss the physics of edge states and in particular, the unique and fascinating properties of edge states associated with the quantum valley Hall effect in a material consisting of two atomic sheets of graphene. Zhu has been exploring this system as the backbone of a quantum interconnect network. She will discuss the progress made in understanding its fundamental properties and the proof-of-concept operations of edge-state-based waveguide, switch and beam splitter.
Jun Zhu earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1996. She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University from 2003-2005 before joining Penn State University in 2006. She is currently a professor of physics at Penn State and a fellow of the American Physical Society. Her research interest focuses on the understanding of new physics and device functionalities arising from quantum phenomena in low dimensions and the control of new electronic degrees of freedom in nanoscale materials and devices. Her recent research projects explore the electronic properties of van der Waals materials and interferences, with a particular emphasis on valleytronic, topological, and quantum Hall phenomena. Her lab homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/junzhulab/home