Cyrus Dreyer
Stony Brook University, NY·Physics·Early-career
Every real material has point defects: tiny imperfections such as a missing atom or a stray impurity. Even in minute amounts, these defects can change how a material behaves.
- Fields
Physics
Materials Science
Chemistry
- Topics
point defects
computational condensed matter physics
quantum embedding
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Develop quantum embedding methods that combine density-functional theory with many-body methods, improving how they treat electron repulsion in defect orbitals, defect–crystal mixing, and double-counting errors.
- Benchmark the approximations in the embedding procedure against quantum Monte Carlo calculations, a high-accuracy statistical simulation approach, for point defects in insulators.
- Determine how correlated excited states and lattice vibrations control light emission and non-radiative energy loss at defects, using the new embedding methods.
- Apply embedding methods to carbon defects in hexagonal BN, transition metals in group-III nitrides, and rare earths in transition-metal dichalcogenides, materials relevant to quantum devices.
More about the research
They can lower solar cell efficiency, let engineers tune a material's properties, or act as quantum bits (qubits) for quantum computers. Because defects are small and dilute, they are hard to measure in experiments, so computer simulations are essential. Standard simulation methods, however, are not accurate enough for how defects respond to light or electrical pulses. More accurate theories exist but cost too much computing power to apply to defects.
Why it matters
Defects decide how well many electronic and optical devices work, and some defects can serve as qubits. More accurate and affordable ways to predict how defects behave when excited by light or electrical pulses could help researchers choose and engineer defects in materials such as hexagonal boron nitride and nitride semiconductors. This could support conventional electronics, solar cells and quantum technologies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yubo Yang
Hofstra University, NY·Physics
Discover and characterize strongly correlated electronic phases in two-dimensional moiré materials, such as generalized Wigner crystals, using many-body wavefunction methods that go beyond mean-field theory.
Jedediah Pixley
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Physics
Determine how twist-angle disorder, the place-to-place variation in twist, alters electronic response in twisted bilayer graphene and twisted transition-metal dichalcogenide bilayers, using kernel polynomial calculations on large disordered models.
Sanjay Behura
San Diego State University, CA·Materials Science
Assess the translation potential of a room-temperature quantum sensor based on optically addressable spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride, light-readable flaws in an atomically thin material, through I-Corps customer discovery.
The school
Stony Brook University: 32 labs on PI Pages, $319M a year on research, 289 research doctorates a year.
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