Heike Pfau, assistant professor of physics at Penn State, has been honored with a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty members who can serve as academic role models in research and education and lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
The five-year CAREER award will support Pfau's research to develop a detailed, microscopic understanding of superconductivity - where materials conduct electricity without losing energy - under unconventional conditions so that it can be extended for use a variety of applications.
"Superconductors are currently used in medical MRI machines and for plasma confinement in fusion reactors, but these materials only superconduct at low temperatures and require expensive and inefficient cooling methods," Pfau said. "This has limited the use of superconductors, which could have widespread use in quantum computing, power generation, transmission, storage and ultrasensitive sensors. We hope to better understand the fundamental interactions that lead to unconventional superconductivity and explore how to control it."
Pfau is particularly interested in studying so-called Majorana zero modes, quasiparticles with unique properties that are a promising platform for building improved quantum computers, she said. These quasiparticles exist in materials that combine superconductors with materials called topological insulators, which constrain electron movement to their edges. Pfau will specifically study how changing the pressure of the environment allows researchers to tune the material's superconducting and topological properties. Several graduate and undergraduate students will participate in the project, and Pfau will also develop and host workshops for K-12 students.
Pfau's previous award and honors include a DFG Research Fellowship from the German Science Foundation in 2018, an Otto-Hahn Medal from the Max-Planck Society in 2016, a Springer Thesis Award in 2016 and a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation in 2015. She has published her research in journals such as Nature, Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Pfau was a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2019 to 2020 and at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 2015 to 2021. She received doctoral and diploma degrees in physics from Technical University Dresden in Germany in 2015 and 2010, respectively.
