The California Institute of Technology has announced that assistant professor of materials science Joseph Falson will receive a $1.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as a 2021 Fellow in Materials Synthesis.

Awarded through the foundation's Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems (EPiQS) Initiative, which aims "to deepen our understanding of the organizing principles that lead to complex collective behaviors of electrons in materials and engineered structures," the grant will enable Falson to pursue methods for growing highly pure crystals of new materials. To that end, Falson plans to build a custom piece of equipment with an ultra-high vacuum chamber for corrosive materials that also offers access to the materials for sensitive experiments.

"Broadly, the field is looking for fundamentally new types of materials that show some type of complex functionality," said Falson. "The properties of these new materials are hard to predict on paper or by just seeing the individual components in isolation. You need to put all of the elements into a container and shake it, so to speak."

(Photo credit: California Institute of Technology)