Quantum materials provide responses and states of matter with no classical analogs. As such, they offer opportunities to create various platforms for future devices crucial to human health, energy efficiency, communications, and imaging. I will describe the physics challenges and sensing opportunities these materials offer, including our efforts to detect novel nonlinear responses and emergent quasi-particles using light. I will then focus on using the relativistic electrons in graphene for biosensing. Specifically, we have developed a new platform for multiplexed, rapid, easy-to-use detectors of biological analytes. I will discuss the unique aspects of graphene involved, resulting in our demonstration of the detection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, decease biomarkers in saliva, opioids in wastewater, and respiratory infection at clinically relevant levels
Kenneth Burch is the Chair and Professor of Physics at Boston College, running the Laboratory for Assembly and Spectroscopy of Emergence (LASE). Before arriving at BC, he was an assistant professor at the U. of Toronto for five years. He is a former Director’s fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he performed ultrafast spectroscopy. He was a graduate student of D. Basov studying the optical properties of magnetic materials at UCSD. He has made seminal contributions to developing novel techniques to understand and exploit quantum materials. This includes discovering the Axial Higgs Mode in a Charge Density Wave, the colossal bulk photovoltaic effect in a Weyl semimetal, modulation doping in 2D materials, fractional spin excitations in a potential Kitaev spin liquid, and he developed cutting-edge biosensors-based on graphene. His group also developed a cleanroom in a glovebox where all fabrication and heterostructure preparation is performed. He was named an APS fellow for his work, received the Lee-Asheroff-Richardson Prize, and the APS GMAG best dissertation award.