Physics Colloquium with Ali Yazdani

Abstract: The advent of two-dimensional materials and their stacks have revolutionized our ability to engineer novel states of matter, especially those with strong interaction and topological properties. The ability to visualize these states with the scanning tunneling microscopy and related techniques to these two-dimensional materials are also making it possible to study interacting systems from unprecedented microscopic perspective. In this talk, I will describe some of these experiments that include studies of electron crystallizations and fractionalized phase of matter. I will describe new experimental methods that are make it possible to visualize single fractional charges and to manipulate these emergent excitations to explore their novel properties.