Dr. Mazhar Ali selected as one of JPCM’s Emerging Leaders of 2019
Dr. Mazhar N. Ali, the Alexander von Humboldt Sofia Kovalevskaja Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, has been selected as one of the “Emerging Leaders of 2019” by the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter (JPCM).
JPCM is an IOP journal covering the range of condensed matter physics topics ranging from soft matter and biophysics to electronic structure and materials physics. Since 2018, they have begun an annual list of top researchers in their field, nominated by their editorial board, who they categorize as “the most exciting researchers of their generation with the potential to revolutionize their fields”.
This year, the AvH SK Group Leader at the MPI of Microstructure Physics, Dr. Mazhar Ali, has received this recognition in a special issue available here: https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0953-8984/page/EmergingLeaders2019
Additionally, Jiho Yoon, a graduate student in the group, also recently published a paper in JPCM entitled, “Anomalous thickness-dependent electrical conductivity in van der Waals layered transition metal halide, Nb3Cl8”. Yoon et al exfoliated thin flakes of Nb3Cl8 and used 2D transfer techniques as well as photolithography to make devices and study the electrical conductivity of the material as a function of temperature and thickness. Their work details an unusual increase of the conductivity in Nb3Cl8 as the sample gets thinner; a backwards trend from the typical finite-size effect. This is the first such observation in a layered transition metal halide (TMH), a class of materials analogous to the famous layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) which has been an extremely hot topic in physics over the last decade. These materials are being deeply investigated for their unusual fundamental physics as well as applications in sensor and memory technologies.
Read the paper (open access) here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-648X/ab832b