Speaking with Andrea Young feels likewatching a racehorse holding itself back at the starting gate. We met on thecampus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where hes a condensedmatter physicist, to chat about his work on 2-D materials. His mind seems to beworking faster than the conversation can flow. My sense is, once the reins areloosened and hes back in the lab hell take off.

Youngs colleagues confirm thats thecase. Hes a whirlwind, says physicist Raymond Ashoori of MIT. When Young wasa postdoc in his lab, Ashoori says, it felt like an idea a minute.

Young, 35, has a way with substances shaved to the thickness of a single atom, such as the sheets of carbon known as graphene. His research has revealed new states of matter, and advanced scientists understanding of the strange physics that arises when materials are sliced thin.

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Things change a lot when you change thenumber of dimensions, Young says.

As a graduate student at ColumbiaUniversity, Young helped create a new type of material that transformed howscientists study graphene. Along with physicists Cory Dean, Philip Kim andcolleagues, Young devised a technique for layering graphene with othermaterials, in particular another compound that forms 2-D sheets called hexagonalboron nitride. The combination makes the sometimes-finicky graphene easier towork with. And the materials electrons can be coaxed to behave in unusual ways,interacting strongly with one another, for example. Reported in Nature Nanotechnology in 2010, the technique was quickly adopted byscientists around the world. Everybody uses it now, Ashoori says.

After his time at Columbia, Young went on to stints at MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, before landing at UC Santa Barbara in 2015. So far, Young has used his layering technique to reveal new quantum phenomena and states of matter with tongue-twisting names like Hofstadters butterfly and fractional Chern insulators. In many of the materials Young studies, electrons exhibit collective behavior, resulting in quasiparticles, excitations in a material that mimic a real subatomic particle. Its a bit like how a crowd of individual people can do the wave by working together.

Keeping up with Youngs rapid progress inthe lab kept his graduate adviser, Kim, busy. Hes extremely brilliant andvery energetic, says Kim, now at Harvard University. Youngs understanding oftheoretical concepts, in combination with experimental know-how, makes himquick to generate and implement new ideas, or follow up on hot research topics.In 2018, he, Dean and colleagues were the first to replicate a blockbusterresult in condensed matter physics: Two sheets of graphene, when layered androtated with respect to one another, become superconducting, allowing electrons to flow without resistance. Youngand colleagues added their own twist, reporting in the March 8 Science that the materialssuperconductivity could be tuned by putting it under pressure.

Youngs swiftness seems to take multipleforms quickness of thought, experimental agility and even fleetness of foot.During a particularly frenzied time, Dean, who has collaborated with Young foryears, was headed to the lab bright and early at around 7 a.m. When Dean lookedup, 100 yards ahead of me was Andrea, rushing even faster to get to the lab.

Youngs fascination with physics came onquickly, too: From my earliest memories, I wanted to be a physicist, and itsnot clear where that idea got nucleated, says Young, who grew up inWashington, D.C.

He doesnt see himself as fast, though. Ratherthan aiming for quick developments, he says that hes motivated by big-picture,long-term questions. His current passion is searching for a proposed new classof quasiparticles, called non-abelian anyons. Thats become the thing that Im obsessed with, he says.

Scientists have discovered a widevariety of quasiparticles, but anyons dont fit into either of the twocategories all other particles do. They arent fermions, familiar particleslike electrons, protons and neutrons; nor are they bosons, which include force-carryingparticles, such as photons, particles of light that transmit electromagneticforces.

Anyons, which appear only in twodimensions, are misfits. And non-abelian anyons are stranger still. Theorysuggests they can be braided with one another by swapping their locations ina material. That braiding could protect fragile quantum information frombecoming corrupt, potentially allowing scientists to create quantum computersthat can perform calculations no standard computer can.

But no one has definitively shown thatnon-abelian anyons exist and have the useful properties necessary for quantumcomputing. A new state of matter called a fractional Chern insulator, which Young and colleagues reported for the firsttime in 2018 in Science, could be alikely hiding place. Young hunter of strange denizens of 2-D matter is inpursuit.

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Andrea Young uncovers the strange physics of 2-D materials - Science News