COSAM News Articles 2024 01 Wencan Jin receives NSF CAREER Award

Wencan Jin receives NSF CAREER Award

Published: 04/05/2024

Auburn physicist seeks to understand chiral phenomena that emerge in a dynamic fashion in quantum materials.

An object is chiral when distinguishable from its mirror image. Chiral structures can be ubiquitously found in nature, ranging from microscopic molecules to astronomical objects, and they have wide applications, for example, in enantioselective catalysis and drug design. According to Wencan Jin, assistant professor of physics who recently received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, “In condensed matter systems, the chiral phenomena may manifest themselves as dynamic properties such as the collective excitations of the crystal lattice and electron spins, called phonon and magnon, respectively. The chiral interactions between phonon and magnon offer a pathway for energy and angular momentum transfer among these different degrees of freedom, which are important for both fundamental science and technological applications.

Jin is awarded a grant of $738,118 from the NSF Division of Material Research for his proposal “CAREER: Chiral Phenomena of Excited States in Spintronics”. The NSF CAREER Awards are highly competitive, offered annually to about 500 early-career faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization”. In this five-year project, Jin aims to tackle some of the most current and relevant problems highlighting chiral interactions as a dynamic property such as the chiral phonon-magnon hybridization. The dynamic chirality has great potential in spintronics, where electron spins and the associated magnetic moment play a key role in the electronics. In addition, the research project is complemented by educational and outreach components. Jin’s research group will actively recruit graduate and undergraduate students for comprehensive training in optical spectroscopy, nanofabrication, and electrical transport experiments. Jin will also develop an Escape Room to bring “symmetry”, the central concept of condensed matter physics, to Alabama schools, particularly in rural areas.

Jin received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2017. After working as a postdoctoral researcher for two years at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he joined Auburn in 2019. He is an assistant professor in Physics and an adjunct assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His Ultrafast and Nonlinear Optics (UNO) Lab focuses on studying two-dimensional van der Waals materials and complex oxides using advanced optical spectroscopy and photoemission spectroscopy techniques.