Quantum Materials and Future Technologies

不列颠哥伦比亚省大学（UBC）在过去的二十年里建立了一个杰出的理论和实验量子材料研究小组。UBC量子物质研究所已成为全球卓越的研究中心，有可能在计算，电子，医学和可持续能源领域引发新的技术革命。 加拿大第一卓越研究基金的投资将使UBC能够建立在其国际公认的领先研究团队的工作基础上。这笔资金将使该大学能够吸引和留住量子物质研究领域最聪明的人才，扩大新的和现有的国际合作伙伴关系，特别是着名的Max Planck-UBC量子材料中心，并培养下一代量子物质研究人员。 资金将支持整个研究生命周期。这包括扩大研究团队现有的核心优势，研究和理解新量子材料的基本特性。它还将使团队更加重视控制量子材料和工程设备，这些设备可以作为应用研究和技术开发的起点。最终，它将与工业伙伴和衍生公司一起将这些发现转化为新的应用和产品，产生社会，环境和经济影响。 量子材料具有广泛的惊人的电子和磁性，引发了最深刻的科学问题，挑战凝聚态物理学。虽然经典物理学描述了物质和能量在更大的宏观尺度上的正常行为，但量子物理学解释了发生在原子水平上的不寻常现象。 量子效应在极端条件下更明显，例如在低温下，但也可以通过将材料层限制为单个原子的厚度来增强，并检查以原子精度逐层构建的材料之间的界面处发生的情况。 通过控制量子材料，研究人员可以将MRI扫描仪从花园小屋的大小减少到笔记本电脑的大小，开发超高效的电网，或者节省磁悬浮列车等应用中使用的可再生材料。这些材料还可能导致更高效和更强大的计算和电子设备，如高性能电池和超级电容器，超低功耗/高速晶体管，新的计算架构和超灵敏的生物传感器。 就像硅是微电子时代和硅谷崛起为经济强国的基础一样，量子材料中出现的更丰富的特性有可能彻底改变当前的技术。 该基金对量子物质研究所的投资-该团队已被公认为该领域的全球领导者-将加强UBC和加拿大作为这一革命性领域的创始人和创新者的作用，并将有助于促进围绕UBC的高科技量子材料研究中心，造福当地，国家和全球社区。

The University of British Columbia (UBC) has established an outstanding theoretical and experimental quantum materials research group over the past two decades. The UBC Quantum Matter Institute has become a global hub of research excellence, with the potential to spur a new technological revolution in computing, electronics, medicine and sustainable energy. The Canada First Research Excellence Fund investment will enable UBC to build on the work of its internationally recognized team of leading researchers. The funding will allow the university to attract and retain the brightest minds in quantum matter research, expand new and existing international partnerships, especially the prestigious Max Planck-UBC Center for Quantum Materials, and train the next generation of quantum matter researchers. The funding will support the entire research lifecycle. This includes expanding on the research team’s existing core strength of investigating and understanding the fundamental properties of new quantum materials. It will also let the team increase their emphasis on controlling quantum materials and engineering devices that can serve as starting points for applied research and technology development. Ultimately, it will lead to translating these discoveries, with industrial partners and spin-off companies, into new applications and products that generate social, environmental and economic impacts. Quantum materials have a wide range of astonishing electronic and magnetic properties that evoke the most profound scientific questions challenging condensed matter physics. While classical physics describes the normal behavior of matter and energy at the larger, macroscopic scale, quantum physics explains unusual phenomena that take place at the atomic level. Quantum effects are more obvious under extreme conditions, such as at low temperatures, but can also be enhanced by restricting layers of material to single atoms in thickness, and examining what happens at the interfaces between materials constructed layer-by-layer with atomic precision. By controlling quantum materials, researchers could reduce MRI scanners from the size of a garden shed to the size of a laptop, develop super-efficient electrical grids, or economize on superconductive materials like the ones used in magnetic levitation trains, among other applications. These materials could also lead to a wide range of more efficient and powerful computing and electronic devices, such as high-performance batteries and supercapacitors, ultra-low power / high-speed transistors, new computing architectures, and ultrasensitive biosensors. In the same way silicon was the basis of the microelectronics era and the rise of Silicon Valley as an economic power, the far richer set of properties emerging in quantum materials has the potential to completely revolutionize current technologies. The Fund investment in the Quantum Matter Institute—a team already acknowledged as a global leader in its field—will enhance UBC and Canada’s role as an originator and innovator in this revolutionary field, and will help foster a high-tech quantum materials research epicentre around UBC with benefits to local, national and global communities.