Plastics are indispensable in our lives; however, a major imbalance between their high production (>400 Mt globally) and end-of-life management (<10% recycling rate) is leading to unrecovered energy, economy, and carbon footprint.
We demonstrated how Rayleigh’s law for phonon scattering can be broken by spatially correlated point defects resulting in an order of magnitude reduction of thermal conductivity.
Existing material synthesis and device fabrication methods do not provide the required precision to create and position quantum-active defects.
The interplay between topology and magnetism can lead to many exotic states.
Vortices in unconventional superconductors can support fundamentally new electronic excitations and act as a basic building block of quantum computing architecture.