DOE Experimental Condensed Matter Physics PI Meeting 2025 - Day 1

That was a full day.  Here are some things I learned, beyond the fact that the ballroom here is clearly kept at about 15°C by default.  (Apologies for not getting everything....)

• About 40% of the DOE ECMP program is related to 2D materials these days.
• Long Ju showed some interesting work trying to understand rhombohedral (ABC-stacked) 5-layer graphene encapsulated by hBN.  Trying to get rid of moiré effects from the hBN/graphene interfaces leads not to more robust quantum anomalous Hall response, but instead leads to very peculiar superconductivity that survives up to very large in-plane and moderately large out-of-plane magnetic fields. This happens in the same regime of charge and gate that would otherwise show QAH.  Looks like some kind of chiral superconductivity that may be topological.
• Andrea Young, meanwhile, in fewer layer rhombohedral systems, showed experiments pointing to superconductivity happening at the verge of a canting transition, where spins are reorienting.
• Eva Andrei gave a nice talk looking at the variety of states one can get when interfacing moiré systems with other moiré systems, and explaining what is meant by intercrystals.  
• Gleb Finkelstein showed how a measurement intended to look at shot noise instead became a very cute noise thermometry probe of thermal transport at the boundary between (graphene) quantum Hall currents and a superconducting electrode.
• Xiao-Xiao Zhang showed a really cute experiment, where the resonance of a drumhead made from an atomically thin film of MnPS3 convey information about magnetic transitions in that material as a function of magnetic field.
• Dan Ralph gave a nice talk about the challenges of electrically generating currents of properly oriented spins to drive magnetic switching in films magnetized perpendicular to the film plane, for spin-orbit torque memories (and fundamental understanding).
• Philip Kim gave a great overview of some remarkable results in electronic interferometers made on graphene, in which telegraph noise shows signatures
• Lu Li spoke about recent measurements showing magnetic oscillations and specific heat signatures of possible neutral fermions in a kagome lattice Mott insulator.
• Xavier Roy talked about CeSiI, a 2D material that is also a heavy fermion metal.  This and its related compounds look like a fascinating family of (unfortunately extremely air sensitive) materials. 
• Harold Hwang gave a great overview of recent work in nickelate superconductors, highlighting the similarities to the cuprates as well as the profound differences (like how electronic configurations other than d9 can also lead to superconductivity).