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 moirĂ© 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 moirĂ© 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 moirĂ© revolution has “changed how research in the field is done: the mix-and match aspect of creating moirĂ© 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 moirĂ© 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