Professor
The biggest mysteries of the universe are not hiding only in faraway galaxies or among subatomic particles. Instead, they may be in your hand, literally, as you hold a pencil. When you use that pencil to draw or write on a sheet of paper, you are creating your own sampling of graphene, hailed as a wonder material and rewarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for its discovery. In recent years, graphene and other materials have been shown to host exotic physics previously thought to only exist either in the large-scale fabric of cosmos or in the subatomic space roamed by elementary particles. This is an exciting era in the sciences that study the physics of such materials, in particular condensed matter physics, atomic physics, and quantum information.