Physics Professor Sid Parameswaran awarded ERC grant

26 April 2024

Hertford Fellow and Professor in Physics Sid Parameswaran has been awarded a prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council. ERC Consolidator Grants enable scientists to establish or strengthen their research teams, and may be awarded up to €2m for a period of five years.

Among other topics, Professor Parameswaran’s research group is working on moiré heterostructures, which are obtained by layering two-dimensional crystalline materials with a small relative twist angle or difference in atomic spaces. It has only become possible to engineer moiré superlattices for electrons relatively recently, but the underlying effect is familiar to anyone who has ever photographed or filmed a striped pattern. According to Professor Parameswaran, the moiré revolution has “changed how research in the field is done: the mix-and match aspect of creating moiré structures, combined with the ability to tune their electron density with electric fields, and the direct access to their properties allowed by their two-dimensional nature, means that the pace of progress is frequently astonishing.”

Professor Parameswaran said: “I am particularly grateful to the students, postdocs, and collaborators, at Oxford and elsewhere, who have worked with me on research that helped lay the groundwork for this project. I have to also thank colleagues across Oxford Physics — a wide range of academics as well the Research Facilitation team led by Hannah Lingard — who gave me crucial help in drafting the proposal and preparing for the always-daunting ERC interview.”

You can read Professor Parameswaran’s fascinating article on moiré structures in the 2021-22 edition of the Hertford College Magazine.

ERC Consolidator Grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The UK agreed a deal to associate to Horizon Europe on 7 September 2023, which will apply from 1 January 2024. This means that UK recipients of 2023 ERC Consolidator Grants will be funded through the UK Government’s Horizon Europe guarantee funding