## Nicholas P. Breznay

Assistant Professor
PhD Stanford
Condensed matter physics
Office
Keck 1247
Phone
909-607-0587 (office)
909-621-8024 (department)
909-621-8887 (fax)
E-Mail
nbreznay@hmc.edu

Early in our careers we learn that electrons are antisocial – they never want to be in the same place at the same time, and their mutual interactions can often be ignored, especially when considering just a few (or a few hundred). But as you crowd more and more into the same space, electrons begin to talk to one another; in solid materials, they sometimes decide to spontaneously organize, condense, and rearrange themselves—collectively assembling into patterns and phases that we never would have predicted from a “one-electron” picture.

Our lab studies the properties and applications of these quantum materials, where the tremendous number (1023) of electrons, and their collective interactions, leads to new and fascinating behavior. These electronic states of matter can have familiar classical analogs—noninteracting gas, strongly interacting “Fermi” liquid, or crystalline solid—but they can also be fundamentally quantum-mechanical states that have no classical analog. We investigate these exotic states of matter—superconductors, spin-liquid magnets, charge-ordered oxides, and amorphous Anderson insulators—using hands-on low-temperature experiments with thin film and bulk crystal samples. Since thermal energy can disrupt fragile quantum states, we cool the samples to temperatures below 1 kelvin, and examine how their electrons respond to intense electromagnetic fields.

### Recent Publications

 Nicholas P. Breznay, Mihir Tendulkar, Li Zhang, Sang-Chul Lee, and Aharon Kapitulnik Superconductor To Weak-Insulator Transitions in Disordered Tantalum Nitride Films Physical Review B 96 (2017) 134522. Nicholas P. Breznay, Alejandro Ruiz, Alex Frano, Wenli Bi, Robert J. Birgeneau, Daniel Haskel, and James G. Analytis Resonant X-Ray Scattering Reveals Possible Disappearance of Magnetic Order Under Hydrostatic Pressure in the Kitaev Candidate $\Gamma$-Li$_2$Iro$_3$ Physical Review B 96 (2017) 020402.

#### Course Schedule

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
09:00–09:50
Physics 51
Shan B454

10:00–10:50
Physics 51
Shan B454

13:15–14:05
Physics 51
Shan B454

15:15–17:15
Physics 50
Keck B127

09:00–09:50
Physics 51
Shan B454

10:00–10:50
Physics 51
Shan B454

13:15–14:05
Physics 51
Shan B454

13:15–17:15
Physics 181
Jacobs B121