Project Overview
For my Honors Senior Thesis (available here), I worked at the interface of experiment and theory by applying ab-initio quantum mechanical simulations to investigate the mechanism behind the superconducting phase in 2D graphene systems.
Supervised by Dr. Jia Li at Brown University’s low-dimensional electronics lab, I built a nano-electronic device from graphene to measure its unique superconducting and magnetic properties at cryogenic temperatures. Building this device provided me experience with several innovative fabrication techniques like graphene exfoliation using scotch tape, nano-circuit design in DesignCAD Express, and electron beam lithography. I received an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award to pursue this research.
I then initiated a collaboration with the Department of Chemistry (PI: Professor Brenda Rubenstein) to better understand this graphene system theoretically. My contributions included implementing a program called TriCrystal (repository available here) that generated the system’s structure, running baseline band structure, density of states, and Fermi surface calculations, and proposing a cluster-based technique to overcome limitations in modeling large systems using DFT. My thesis laid the groundwork for my advisors to continue studying this system using a combined approach, which they were awarded a DEPSCoR grant to do.