Undergraduate Connor Hann was designated a Faculty Scholar for the Class of 2016 by the Academic Council and its Faculty Scholars Committee. This is the highest honor Duke University faculty can award undergraduates.
Hann's advisors are Profs. Shailesh Chandrasekharan and Joshua Socolar. He is currently working with Prof. Chandrasekharan on trying to understand the origin of the sign problem in frustrated quantum spin systems. Such systems are known to be at the heart of some of the most exotic phenomena in condensed matter materials including the one that Prof. Sara Haravifard studies in her lab. Hann's honors thesis treats a fundamental question relating to the growth of icosahedral quasicrystals. These materials have an intricate atomic structure that is highly ordered, but not periodic, and exhibit the symmetries of an icosahedron. Working with Prof. Socolar and Prof. Paul Steinhardt (Princeton) on space-filling tiling models, Hann showed that local growth kinetics can, in principle, produce a nearly defect-free icosahedral quasicrystal structure. The work may be relevant for understanding the origin of a grain of a new material with this structure, dubbed "icosahedrite," that was recently found on a rock sample coming from a meteorite.
Congratulations to Connor Hann for this prestigious award. See the list of previous Faculty Scholars here.
Department of Physics
