Ian Fisher

Stanford University, EPiQS Materials Synthesis Investigator

EPiQS Investigators

Research Description

Dr. Fisher is a professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University, where he is also the director of the Geballe Laboratory for advanced materials. His research program seeks to obtain a deeper understanding of the rules and organizing principles governing emergent behavior in strongly correlated electron systems through a combination of crystal growth of novel materials and the development of new experimental approaches to probe their thermodynamic and transport properties.

In physics, distributions of charges and/or currents can be described in terms of “multipoles”, the simplest case being an electric monopole (i.e. a single charge), building up to higher order multipoles such as electric quadrupoles, magnetic octupoles and so on. Dr. Fisher’s vision for this award from the Moore Foundation is to discover materials, and develop new tools and perspectives, which elucidate the roles played by these types of higher order multipoles and their associated fluctuations, especially in relation to superconductivity and unconventional (non-Fermi-liquid) metallic behavior.

These research directions are inspired by, and connect directly to, major unsolved problems associated with the interrelation of superconductivity and electronic nematicity (a type of electronic order in which electronic degrees of freedom spontaneously break rotational symmetries, a concept that is closely related to electric quadrupole order). They also build upon the substantial contributions Dr. Fisher’s group has made in recent years in the area of electronic nematic order, including their use of strain as a tuning parameter for such systems. The vision is broader though, also encompassing even higher order multipoles as well as cases where the multipole orientation varies through a material. This is an incredibly rich area for investigation using the approaches that they have pioneered, with potential for major impacts on the understanding of correlated materials proximate to quantum phase transitions.

Dr. Fisher is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and has been a Stanford Fellow, a Chambers Faculty Fellow, a Crocker Faculty Fellow, a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Terman Fellow and a Sloan Research Fellow. He has also won the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. He was a recipient of a Materials Synthesis Investigator Award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2014. Dr. Fisher earned his PhD from Cambridge University in 1997.