Advancing Ultra-Fast Sound Technology
MIE Assistant Professor Yoseob Yoon’s research on “Terahertz Phonon Engineering With van der Waals Heterostructures” was published in Nature. He has discovered a way to create atomically thin transducers that could one day enable quantum computing at room temperature.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Noah Lloyd. Main photo: Yoseob Yoon, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and physics, works at Northeastern’s Innovation Campus in Burlington. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Northeastern professor achieves major breakthrough in the manufacture of quantum computing components
Quantum computers have to be kept cold to function—very cold. These machines generally run at “just a few degrees above absolute zero,” says Yoseob Yoon, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University. “It’s colder than outer space.”
Yoon’s research focuses on “controlling material properties using lasers,” he says.
In other words, he shoots light at atomically thin materials to get them moving in novel ways.
One of his principal materials is something called graphene, a two-dimensional surface whose discoverers received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, Yoon says.
Yoseob Yoon poses for a portrait. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
Yoon produces graphene through what he calls the Scotch Tape method. “We use a few millimeter-wide and -thick bulk materials of, for example, graphite,” he says, the same carbon derivative found in pencils. “We basically use Scotch Tape—literally—to peel off” ultra-thin samples from the bulk material.
These samples are the thickness of a single atom, “smoother than most other materials,” he says.
There already existed a field studying “thermal transport using thin metallic films,” Yoon says. By firing lasers at very thin metals, researchers can induce controlled oscillations like acoustic waves in drums.
However, “this has been limited to gigahertz regimes, because these metals are very heavy, and they cannot be controlled down to monolayer thickness.
“And then there is another field, basically a 2D-material field,” he continues. “They exfoliate these atomically thin layers.”
Yoon’s breakthrough came in combining these two fields. By aligning atomically thin structures with the study of laser-based thermal transport, “there’s a new regime that we couldn’t achieve before.”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News