Research Interests

Our main current interest is to advance the frontier in quantum materials through the measurement of fluctuations of novel types of order. These are at the heart of the fundamental physics in these types of solids, but have remained challenging to directly measure.

One key component for this research program is in the application of newly developed coherent scattering methods using X-ray free electron lasers which can access these fluctuations on relevant energy scales.

This will allow one to make direct, element-specific and momentum-resolved measurements of the fluctuations of a complex material and connect them to requisite response functions calculated from first principles. Extracting spontaneous fluctuation information from the system under study provides opportunities to answer many fundamental questions in this field, such as: do density wave fluctuations in unconventional superconductors induce high-temperature superconductivity?