Physicist wins Packard Fellowship
MIT physicist Pablo Jarillo-Herrero has won a 2009 David and Lucile Packard Fellowship, an award he will use to study a new class of materials that could have applications in the semiconductor industry and quantum computing. The five-year, $875,000 grant will allow Jarillo-Herrero to explore the unique features of graphene and a type of materials known as topological insulators, whose electrons display unique behavior. In most everyday materials, including metals and silicon, electrons behave just like other particles with mass — for example, their velocity depends on their energy. Recently, scientists have discovered a new class of materials — including graphene and topological insulators — whose electrons behave more like massless particles such as neutrinos or photons rather than electrons. Electrons in these materials are described by putting Albert Einstein's special relativity and quantum mechanics together. "This grant is going to allow me to perform experiments...