
Hongyuan Li
2022 Philomathia Graduate Student Fellow
Hongyuan is currently a PhD candidate majoring in applied science and technology at UC Berkeley. His research work mainly focuses on the experimental condensed matter physics, particularly the strongly correlated electron behavior in low-dimensional materials. He obtained his BS degree in physics from Xian Jiaotong University at China in 2017.
Hongyuan’s work focuses on studying the strongly correlated electrons in two-dimensional system through developing novel scanning probe microscopic techniques. Novel correlated quantum phases can emerge in the various 2D van der waals heterostructure due to the strong electron Coulomb interactions. However, to probe these novel states in real space is challenging for lack of an efficient microscopic tool. Conventional microscopic tools could induce too strong perturbation so that the fragile correlated electronic states can be destroyed before being probed. Hongyuan tries to develop non-invasive scanning probe microscopic tools that enables the real-space study of the properties of correlated quantum phases in 2D heterostructure in different degrees of freedom. One of his recent aims is to study the dynamics of various elementary excitations in correlated states and investigate their spatial dependence. To achieve this goal, he is trying to develop a high frequency (kHz-GHz) STM method.