Victor Brar
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Physics·Early-career
We usually picture electrons moving through a material like billiard balls bouncing around, or like heat spreading out evenly. In many materials, though, they move in stranger ways, sometimes flowing together like a viscous liquid.
- Fields
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
condensed matter physics
scanning tunneling potentiometry
scanning tunneling superconducting thermometry
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Develop scanning tunneling potentiometry and scanning tunneling superconducting thermometry, tip-based methods that map charge and heat flow, and use them to image nanoscale flow in graphene.
- Measure how far heat and charge flow become decoupled in hydrodynamic electron systems that violate the Wiedemann–Franz law, using engineered potential barriers that affect heat and charge differently.
- Probe how heat is dissipated in viscous electron flow to identify what limits its conductivity and to solve thermoelectric flow self-consistently.
- Use potentiometry in magnetic fields to test how bound states and snake states disturb quantum Hall conductance plateaus, create charge vortices, and whether electron viscosity becomes quantized.
More about the research
That flow has never been watched directly at the scale where it happens. This project aims to build microscopy tools that make visible the flow of electrons and heat at the nanoscale. Understanding this motion could help produce materials with lower electrical resistance and better heat conduction.
Why it matters
Seeing directly how electrons and heat move could guide the design of materials with less electrical resistance and better heat conduction. According to the grant, it could also lead to improved thermoelectric devices, which convert heat into electricity, built from hydrodynamic materials. The grant also notes that these electron fluids could be used to model fluid and air flows more cheaply than current methods.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yusong Bai
Brown University, RI·Physics·Early-career
Establish correlated electronic states and electric-field-controlled metal-insulator transitions in heterostructures where ordered nanocrystal superlattices impose periodic potentials on atomically thin materials, using low-temperature electrical transport.
Fereshte Ghahari Kermani
George Mason University, VA·Physics·Early-career
Measure the thermodynamic entropy carried by the emergent quasiparticles of fractional quantum Hall states using thermopower — the voltage produced by a temperature gradient — and test whether entropy can distinguish Abelian from non-Abelian states.
Lu Li
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
Use thermoelectric and thermal Hall measurements to determine the nature of the magnetic-field-driven insulator-to-metal transition and the origin of quantum oscillations in Kondo insulators.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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