Three Yale Physicists Receive Early Career Awards

October 4, 2024

Charles Brown, Ian Moult, and Eduardo Higino da Silva Neto received recognition for their cutting-edge research.

Three members of the Department of Physics have received early career awards to support their cutting-edge research.  

Charles Brown, Assistant Professor of Physics, and a member of Yale’s Wright Lab, received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to support his lab in experimentally exploring the quantum properties of a unique class of crystals known as quasicrystals.

“I’m deeply honored to have received such generous support from the NSF, especially so near the outset of my role as a faculty member,” Brown said. “I’m fortunate to be working with an excellent team, including Yale Quantum Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Cedric Wilson, and graduate students Andrew Neely, Ryan Everly and Raffaella Zanetti.”

Brown described the innovative, experimental work his team will be conducting: “We will confine extremely cold atoms within a grid made of light, which emulates the behavior of electrons confined within solids. Our experiment will allow us to explore a wide array of problems in the quantum science and engineering of materials.”

Two additional members of the department – Eduardo Higino da Silva Neto, Assistant Professor of Physics and member of the Yale Energy Sciences Institute, and Ian Moult, Assistant Professor of Physics and a member of Yale’s Wright Lab– received recognition from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program, which supports scientists at the outset of their careers.

Da Silva Neto said he was grateful for the DOE’s support, which will fund studies of van der Waals magnets using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy (STM/S). “As the study of these materials is a new direction for my group and STM/S techniques in this area are still evolving, the five-year support from the DOE will be essential for its success,” he said. “We’re excited to apply the STM/S techniques we continue to develop to these underexplored magnets, which hold great potential for both practical applications and advancing fundamental physics.”

Speaking about collider experiments the Early Career Award will support, Moult said: “The Standard Model of particle physics stands as a crowning achievement of the unification of quantum mechanics and special relativity. However, despite its successes, many questions remain about its behavior at extreme energies, temperatures and densities.  

“Collider experiments offer a unique opportunity to stress test the Standard Model, and to search for new physics, new interactions, and new principles of nature. This DOE Early Career Award will allow me to pursue a broad research program connecting deep theoretical ideas with ongoing collider experiments, many led by researchers at Yale.”

“We are very proud to have Charles Brown, Eduardo da Silva Neto, and Ian Moult in the Physics Department,” said Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor and Chair of Physics and Director of Yale’s Wright Lab. “These awards recognize their outstanding research and promise for the future. I am looking forward to seeing the results of their work in the years to come. With them, the future for Yale Physics looks very bright!”

This article was adapted from an article that appeared in Yale FAS News on October 4, 2024.

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