Hiroki Wadati
Program
Junior Fellow Academy
Appointment
Junior Fellow Academy - Alumni
Institution
University of Tokyo
Country
Japan 
Hiroki Wadati is a faculty member in the Department of Applied Physics and Quantum-Phase Electronics Centre at the University of Tokyo. He was a CIFAR Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2011, supervised by Quantum Materials Fellow George Sawatzky in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007 from the University of Tokyo under thesis advisor Prof. Atsushi Fujimori.
Dr. Wadati is working to understand the electronic structures of materials whose electrons strongly interact or correlate with each other. He uses a particle accelerator, or synchrotron, to study these materials, including techniques such as resonant soft x-ray scattering, x-ray absorption spectroscopy, and photoemission spectroscopy. He is especially interested in the novel ways that electrons structure themselves at the interface between two different materials that are put together; for example, metallic conductivity surprisingly exists at the interface between two connected insulators. When an interface is formed between polar materials (which have electric charges) and non-polar ones (without charges), some kind of reconstruction of the electronic structure occurs in order to avoid the divergence of electric potentials in the layers of polar materials. (Electric potentials are an expression of potential energy, measured in volts.) Researchers expect that such reconstruction causes metallic conductivity to occur. Understanding these properties will open doors to discovering and learning about other new and unexpected phenomena in condensed matter physics and could potentially be important in developing a new class of electronic devices.
Dr. Wadati is working to understand the electronic structures of materials whose electrons strongly interact or correlate with each other. He uses a particle accelerator, or synchrotron, to study these materials, including techniques such as resonant soft x-ray scattering, x-ray absorption spectroscopy, and photoemission spectroscopy. He is especially interested in the novel ways that electrons structure themselves at the interface between two different materials that are put together; for example, metallic conductivity surprisingly exists at the interface between two connected insulators. When an interface is formed between polar materials (which have electric charges) and non-polar ones (without charges), some kind of reconstruction of the electronic structure occurs in order to avoid the divergence of electric potentials in the layers of polar materials. (Electric potentials are an expression of potential energy, measured in volts.) Researchers expect that such reconstruction causes metallic conductivity to occur. Understanding these properties will open doors to discovering and learning about other new and unexpected phenomena in condensed matter physics and could potentially be important in developing a new class of electronic devices.