Nadya Mason: Physics Professor & Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award Winner

Posted on 01. Oct, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Faculty, I'm a Full Professor!, Research, Scholarly Celebrations

Professor Nadya Mason received her bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University in 1995 and received her doctorate in physics in 2001 from Stanford University, working in the group of Aharon Kapitulnik. Her thesis research was on phase transitions in two-dimensional superconductors.

Prior to joining the physics faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Professor Mason was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where she collaborated with Professors Charles Marcus and Michael Tinkham on projects related to both carbon nanotubes and nanostructured superconductors.

This year, Dr. Mason was awarded the 2009 Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology | Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Dr. Mason is a spokesperson for increasing diversity in physics and for creating a climate in academia that embraces and supports minorities and women. In her successful proposal to the National Science Foundation, she laid out a five year plan specifically to increase the involvement of women and minorities in physics through research-related activities. She has mentored underrepresented undergraduates in grant-supported research, organizes nanoscience sessions at the National Conference of Black and Hispanic Physicists and organized science-based workshops for high school students and teachers.

Research
Professor Mason’s research at Illinois focuses on how electrons behave in low-dimensional, correlated materials, where enhanced interactions are expected to give novel results. She is particularly interested in the effect of reduced dimensionality and correlations on electron coherence. The understanding and control of electronic coherence is relevant to a variety of systems, including quantum communication, information storage, and qubit control in quantum computers. Professor Mason plans to take advantage of modern fabrication techniques to make and study a variety of nanostructures, such as quantum dots and wires, as well as arrays of superconducting dots.

So far Professor Mason’s research has focused on the quantum behavior of nanotubes and on 2D and nanostructured superconductors. In both of these areas, her previous work has allowed us to gain insight into coherence and correlations in low-dimensional materials. In her work with nanotubes, she developed new fabrication techniques to control quantum properties of dots and wires. In her work with two-dimensional superconductors, she discovered unusual correlated phases and developed ways of trying to control and understand these phases. Work in both of these areas will continue. Typical measurements will be of electronic transport at low temperatures, with the aim of investigating the effects of electron-electron interactions, disorder, dissipation and sample-geometry. All of these effects can be tuned to augment-or diminish-coherence in nanostructures. Tuning these parameters is also expected to produce novel states of matter, and should allow us to identify and characterize the various forms of correlated electronic states that are induced in nanostructures.

Initial projects will include: (i) Tunneling experiments in carbon nanotubes, to study unusual correlated states such as Luttinger liquids, (ii) Tuning electronic correlations in nanotubes and nanowires via proximity effects caused by metallic, magnetic or superconducting current leads, and (iii) Creating planar arrays of superconducting dots, to control and understand collective phenomena in them.

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