Oct 19 2025: Yonglong attended the first Scialog meeting on Quantum Matter and Information. It was an intense, long weekend, but it was fun meeting new folks across different disciplines and brainstorming new ideas for advancing Quantum!
Oct 8 2025: Yonglong co-organized an eQMA workshop on “Hidden order and Quantum Entanglement” at Rice. Thank you everyone for coming and all the sponsors for their generous support! Check out the news article and the recorded talks on the eQMA Youtube channel.
August 2, 2025: Yonglong co-organized the 2025 Young Research Leaders in Topological Materials and Beyond at the Rice Global Center in Paris. It was rewarding to see a year of planning come to life, and even better to witness everyone enjoying this much-anticipated annual gathering. Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this unique event. Check out this news article!
August 1, 2025: Tommy, an inaugural RAMI summer research fellow presented her work on AFM-based nanolithography of 2D materials at the Rice Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium! She was also featured on the RAMI Linkedin page!
July 3, 2025: Our paper on probing the strong correlation effects in supermoiré lattices has just been published in Science via First Release. Here is a link to our paper and the news article. This work suggests that supermoiré potentials may be used as a tunable parameter for designing quantum phases and an effective tool for unraveling correlated phenomena in moiré materials. Congrats to the team!
June 26, 2025: Our paper on probing the light electrons and their interplay with the flat band electrons in twisted trilayer graphene has just been published in Nature Physics. Here is a free link to our paper. Perhaps tuning the ratio between light and heavy electrons can lead to new and most robust quantum phases? Check out this News article for a popular summary of this work.
May 24, 2025: Yonglong has been named to the 2024 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35) China list. It is a true honor to join the TR35 community! Check out the Rice news article.
May 22, 2025: Check out this new theory paper led by the Si group in which we propose nonlinear thermal and thermoelectric transport as a novel probe for quantum geometry in topological materials.
May 20, 2025: Congratulations to Yonglong, who has received the 2025 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards from Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). This award will support our efforts to detect exotic quasiparticles in graphene heterostructures. Check out the Rice news article.
May 3, 2025: Yonglong has been selected as a Fellow for the 2025 Scialog on Quantum Matter and Information, organized by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. It is an honor to join the Scialog community, and we look forward to engaging in interdisciplinary discussions aimed at developing new methodologies and deepening our understanding of the quantum world.
April 29, 2025: Congratulations to Yuxuan, who was just awarded the highly competitive and prestigious Nettie S. Autrey Fellowship! This highly competitive fellowship is awarded to only one student across all disciplines in the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering each year—and it is rarely given to second-year students. An outstanding recognition of Yuxuan’s talent and promise!
April 25 2025: Yonglong co-organized the 2025 edition of the Rice Spring School on Electron Correlation and Topology. Wentian gave a 15-minute contributed talk, and Yuxuan presented a poster. Learn more about the school in this news article.
April 17 2025: Wentian and Yuxuan presented their work on scanning SET microscopy of 2D materials at the Smalley-Curl Institute Thematic Working Interest Groups (TWIG) on Moiré Quantum Matter. They were popular!
April 4 2025: After two weeks of hard work, we turned the crates into a working dilution fridge. Kudos to Zihan, Jiawei, and the installation team from Oxford Instruments! Bonus: we also learned from experts how to isolate He3 and He4 to make the perfect mixture :).
Mar 18 2025: Yonglong gave an invited talk at the March Meeting in Anaheim, CA.
Mar 12 2025: Without notice, our new dilution refrigerator with a 12 Tesla superconducting magnet showed up today. We cannot wait to unpack these crates!
Feb 20 2025: Our very first measurement of magnetic field-dependent local compressibility are in. While there’s room to improve the resolution (and we know how), one question is already keeping us up at night: where did all the missing segments go?!
Feb 3 2025: Congratulations to Tommy, who was just awarded the RAMI Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Thanks RAMI for the support!
Jan 3 2025: Some decent local electronic compressibility data just came out of our new scanning SET microscope, showing much more features than the transport measurement of the same moire device. Each peak in the black trace corresponds to a quantum Hall state and the dips likely mark the phase transition between them!
Nov 26 2024: Our paper on supermoiré lattices has just been accepted by Science ! This work highlights the power of sub-micron-scale characterization with the scanning SET and introduces the novel concept of supermoiré engineering. Check out the arXiv version here.
Nov 11 2024: Some fun we have been having with AFM: on the left, imaging the moiré pattern of a twisted stack; on the right right, drawing patterns within a 2D material. Kudos to Xiangyang et al!
Nov 1 2024: Wentian gave an invited talk at the RQI Quantum Group Meeting.
Oct 25 2024: We finally received the two-axis magnet for our scanning microscope. Our excitement can be clearly seen in the picture!
Oct 18 2024: Our scanning SET is online! Here is a “topography” of a moiré device taken by the microscope, overlaid on the optical image of a 2D device.
Oct 16 2024: Yonglong co-organized a workshop on “Quantum Materials and Entanglement” at Rice. Thank you everyone for coming and all the sponsors for their generous support! Check out this news article!
Oct 4 2024: Upon minimizing the heat load, our microscope reaches nearly 300mK! We also observed Coulomb blockade oscillations of the SET tip, the key feature for high resolution electric field sensing
Sept 28 2024: After making nearly 20 attempts in the past week, we finally got a good looking SET tip! We cannot wait to integrate this into our microscope!
Sept 18 2024: Yonglong gave an invited talk at the 2024 Center for Integrated Technology User Meeting, at Santa Fe, NM. Looking forward to future collaboration with scientists at CINT!
Sept 5 2024: Yonglong gave an invited talk at the CMD31 in Braga, Portugal. It was great to see incommensurate systems are gaining lots of attention!
Aug 29 2024: Group dinner at XiaoLongKan to welcome new group members and celebrate the progress we have made in the past year! Looking forward to great science ahead!
Aug 23 2024: We have successfully assembled the customized scanning microscope. We are now testing its tuning fork based AFM capability.
Aug 15 2024: Welcome Zhicheng Li (Graduate Student in Physics) and Tommy Liu (Sophomore)!
Aug 13 2024: The test dewar and the He3 insert for the scanning SET microscope are here! It was not easy to unwrap these. Thanks everyone for the hard work!
Aug 6 2024: Welcome Xiangyang Li (USTC) and Yufei Du (Nanjing U.) who joined us for their research internship!
Aug 5 2024: Yonglong gave an invited talk at the Quantum Matter Working Group at the Los Alamos National Lab, NM.
Jul 8 2024: Welcome Boyao Zhang (USTC), Yongxiang Xu (USTC), Shenhao Miao (Nanjing U.) and Ye Lin (PKU), who joined us for their research internship!
Jun 21 2024: Yonglong attended the workshop “Young Research Leaders in Topological Materials and Beyond” held at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It was highly stimulating and great to catch up with old friends and meet new ones. Curious to know where the next iteration will be!
Jun 04 2024: Welcome Wentian Zheng (SCI Postdoc Fellow) and Jiawei Hu (Junior Fellow of Rice Academy)! They are now, together with Yuxuan, visiting the Formfactor factory in Woburn, MA for two weeks to check out the customized He3 system and learn about all the secret for operating it. They also took advantage of the scenic views of New England!
May 15 2024, Yonglong attended the Rice/PSL Research Summit at the Rice Global Paris Center, where Rice and PSL (Yonglong’s alma mater) launch strategic global partnership for research and innovation. Check out this new article!
Apr 15 2024: Welch foundation grant awarded! This award will allow us to explore new correlated and topological states through stack engineering. Thank you Welch foundation!
April 2 2024: These pictures showcase our crafting skill. 90% of the components have been replaced/upgraded by Yuxuan. Now we are ready to fabricate nanoscale scanning sensors!
March 5 2024: Yonglong co-organized and gave a lecture at the School on “Electron Correlation and Topology” at Rice. Thank you everyone for coming and all the sponsors for their generous support!
Feb 5 2024: Yonglong gave an invited talk at the workshop “Fractional Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect and Fractional Chern Insulators”, at MPI-Dresden, Germany.
Jan 22 2024: NSF CAREER award! This award will allow us to explore novel quantum phases of bosons in solid using tunable magnons in graphene quantum Hall ferromagnets. Thank you NSF!
Jan 8 2024: Welcome Yuxuan Yao (Graduate Student in Physics)!
Jan 5 2024: Yonglong gave an invited talk at the workshop “The 9th International Workshop on Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Hall Systems”, hosted by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Nov 8 2023: Yonglong co-organized a workshop on “Flat Bands, Strong Correlations and Topology” at Rice. Thank you everyone for coming and all the sponsors for their generous support!
Nov 1 2023: Lab renovation is done. Also, we have installed the vibration isolation system for our high-resolution scanning SET microscope. Thanks everyone for their hard work!
Aug 22 2023: Lab renovation is ongoing. This week’s main focus is to build a 65dB-acoustically-shielded room for our high-resolution scanning microscope. The walls are already half-way done.
Aug 10 2023: Welcome Zihan Wang ( Graduate student in Physics)!
July 10 2023: While waiting for the lab renovation, we have already started stacking layers of 2D materials in our temporary lab space.
July 7 2023: Welcome Xiaoxiao Yu (USTC) and Yinshi Chen (USTC), who will visit us for six months!
July 1 2023: Yonglong officially started his position at Rice.