Francisco Guinea obtained his BSc (1975) in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Phd at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1980) . He obtained a Fullbright Fellowship and worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during the years 1982-1984. He became Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1985, and Senior Researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in 1987. He has been visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, 1991-1992, and visiting Researcher at the University of California San Diego, 1997, and Boston University, 2004-2005. He has stayed for shorter periods at a number of institutions worldwide, like IBM Rüschlikon, Kernforschunganlage Jülich, DIPC, San Sebastián, ICTP, Trieste, ENS, Par ́s, and many more. He joined Imdea Nanoscience in January 2005.

F. G. has published over 400 scientific papers, with an h-index of 75 and more than 50 papers with over 100 citations. He has received a number of awards, including the biannual National Prize for Physics (Spain), and the Gold Medal of the Spanish Physical Society.

The group has varied interests intheoretical condensed matter physics and materials science. In particular, we focus on:

1. Novel properties and devices of graphene. Electronic and structural properties.
2. Optical and structural properties of two dimensional semiconductors, like transition metal dichalco- genides and black phosphorus.
3. Two dimensional superconductivity.

Pierre Pantaleón obtained his BSc (2007) in Physics and MSc (2010) in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in México. He earned his PhD (2019) in Physics at The University of Manchester, focusing on the electronic and topological properties of ferromagnetic lattices. In 2019, he joined the theoretical modeling group at IMDEA Nanociencia, where he has been actively participated in studying the electronic, topological, and superconducting properties of graphene heterostructures.

His research interests are about the study of the electronic, topological, structural, and superconducting properties of artificial superlattices of graphene multilayers and other 2D materials. He is also interested in developing machine learning techniques and apply high-performance computing to the study of 2D physical systems.

Dr Zhen Zhan will develop a new self-consistent method by combining tight-binding model with a tight binding propagation method (TBPM) in their home-made simulator, named TBPLaS. An advantage of this new method is that the computational cost is linearly dependent on the size of the system. Therefore, it can extend the self-consistent calculations to systems containing millions of atoms. Furthermore, Dr Zhan will consider the lattice relaxation effects, which are relevant in the exploration of novel properties of vdW heterostructures.

Dr Zhan will investigate the novel properties and explain the microscopic mechanics of correlated properties of vdW heterostructures discovered in experiments.  

The collaboration with researchers in IMDEA Nanociencia will increase more the feasibility of his research proposal, which will be a significant breakthrough to their home-made simulator named TBPLaS. More importantly, by working with researchers in IMDEA Nanociencia, she would like to gain professional skills for the development of continuum models and deep understanding of superconductivity and strongly correlated properties of two-dimensional materials.

With this, she hopes to make important contributions to explain the phenomena appearing in the two dimensional world due to twistronics. IMDEA Nanociencia is a national and international institute, and has a dynamical research environment. In a long term, by working there, Dr Zhan will gain more experience on working with people with different backgrounds and from different countries. All these will ensure her to be an independent researcher after the fellowship. With a secondment in groups at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, USA, she woulds like to gain experimental experience related to the superconductivity of two dimensional heterostructures.

More info on IDEAL Fellowhisp Programme https://idealcofund-project.eu/postdoc/

The IDEAL Fellowships Programme is supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) COFUND. Grant agreement ID: 101034431.

• Novel electronic properties of van der Waals heterostructures with different compositions

1. Qianying Hu, Zhen Zhan, Huiying Cui, Yalei Zhang, Feng Jin, Xuan Zhao, Mingjie Zhang, Zhichuan Wang, Qingming Zhang, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguichi, Xuewei Cao, Wu-Ming Liu, Fengcheng Wu, Shengjun Yuan, Yang Xu, Observation of Rydberg moiré excitons. Science 380, 1367-1372 (2023). DOI: DOI: 10.1126/science.adh1506

2. Min Long, Pierre A Pantaleón, Zhen Zhan, Francisco Guinea, Jose Ángel Silva-Guillén, Shengjun Yuan, An atomistic approach for the structural and electronic properties of twisted bilayer Graphene-boron nitride heterostructures. npj Computational Materials 8, 73 (2022). DOI:
   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-022-00763-1

3. Haohao Shi, Zhen Zhan, Zhikai Qi, Kaixiang Huang, Edo van Veen, Jose Angel SilvaGuillen, Runxiao Zhang, Pengjun Li, Kun Xie, Hengxing Li, Mikhail I. Katsnelson, Shengjun Yuan, Shengyong Qin and Zhenyu Zhang,  Large-area, periodic, and tunable intrinsic pseudo-magnetic fields in low-angle twisted bilayer graphene.  Nature Communications 11, 371 (2020). (75 citations)  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-14207-w

Alejandro Jimeno Pozo obtained his BSc in Physics (2017) and MSc in Nanophysics and Advanced Materials (2020) from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He then joined the group of Prof. Francisco Guinea at the IMDEA Nanociencia institute where he is currently working as a PhD student on theoretically modelling the electronic properties of graphene-based materials. His research interests mainly include Many-Body Physics, 2D Materials, and Artificial Intelligence.

Héctor is a PhD student in the group of Prof. Paco Guinea. His research is focused on twisted bilayer graphene junctions. In particular, he want to understand the effects of angle disorder and predict signatures of topological superconductivity in devices made of this material. Héctor studied a masters in physics at ETH Zurich and a bachelors in physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research interests include 2D materials, superconductivity and quantum computation.