(Credit: American Physical Society)
To mark the 50th anniversary of Physical Review B, editors selected “milestone” papers that have made lasting contributions to condensed matter physics, including one co-written by JQI Fellow Sankar Das Sarma.
Das Sarma wrote the selected paper, Dielectric function, screening, and plasmons in two-dimensional graphene, with Euyheon Hwang. Hwang earned his doctorate in 1996 under Das Sarma, and after appointments as a UMD research associate and assistant research scientist, accepted a faculty post at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea. He is one of about 100 of Das Sarma’s students and postdocs who have gone on to faculty appointments.
Hwang and Das Sarma have written about 120 articles together, including 88 papers in PRB from 1994 to 2019.
The milestone paper was published in 2007 and has 1,744 citations. In it, the authors developed a many body theory for the dynamical dielectric function of doped graphene at an arbitrary wave vector and frequency. The dielectric function directly determines many physical properties, including electrical and optical properties. This ‘milestone’ publication by Hwang and Das Sarma has been instrumental in the development of the fundamental physics of graphene and has also ushered in the technological field of ‘graphene plasmonics,’ which is being widely pursued worldwide for practical engineering uses in optics and photonics.
Das Sarma, the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics, is a Distinguished University Professor and the director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center. He is internationally known for his work on topological quantum computation, Majorana physics, spin quantum computation, many-body phenomena, quantum localization and nonequlibrium statistical mechanics, and has recently entered into the study of twisted bilayer graphene and higher-order topological systems. Google Scholar counts 90,227 citations and calculates an h-index of 124.
This story was originally published by the Department of Physics at UMD. It has been adapted here with minor changes.