This is Ozarks at Large. Many of the biggest scientific discoveries happening on the University of Arkansas campus are too small to see. Material science focuses on the atomic scale. It's the study of the structure and properties of materials like graphene, silicon carbide and silicon germanium tin. And the University of Arkansas is particularly strong in materials science research. On the latest episode of Short Talks From The Hill, Todd Price speaks with Hugh Churchill, physics professor and director of the new Arkansas Materials Institute.
Price: Before we talk about the work you're doing today, I want to hear about how you came to be a physicist. You grew up in Conway, Arkansas. When did you realize that you were interested in science?
Churchill: So I was always interested in how things work as a kid. I like to take things apart, not necessarily put them back together successfully. Throughout high school, I really enjoyed physics and chemistry classes, but was also very interested in music. And actually when I started college, I thought I wanted to be an orchestral tuba player. And I got to the conservatory, found out that I needed to raise money to buy an even bigger tuba than the one that I already had.
Couldn't think of a way to raise those funds as a musician, but was aware that there were summer research programs for science students. And so I recast myself as a physics researcher, applied to one of those programs and was lucky enough to get in. In the process of doing that project, as a summer research intern, really discovered a joy for research and became very excited about the thrill of scientific discovery and finding out new things that hadn't been known previously.
Price: So I don't think there's many musicians who are physicists as a side gig to pay for their music.
Churchill: That's right. It's much harder to do it the other way.
Price: I understand you studied music, mathematics and physics at Oberlin College where you did your undergraduate work.
Churchill: That's right.
Price: When did you make that decision? That physics was the way you were headed and not music?
Churchill: It was really at the midpoint. I think it was after my second year at Oberlin. That summer, I actually came to the University of Arkansas for a research experience and my mentor for that program was actually Greg Salamo, who recently retired after more than 50 years of service to the university as director of the Institute for Nanoscale Science and Engineering.
Price: You went on to get your Ph.D. in physics at Harvard, and then you completed a fellowship at MIT, and then you came back to Arkansas to be a faculty member. You might have hinted at the reason for that, but obviously you had a family connection. You had already made a connection with a faculty member. But what brought you back to the state?
Churchill: So it was the family connection. As you mentioned, my wife and I are both from Conway, so I wanted to get back closer to family, but also what I came to realize from that experience at the University of Arkansas is how strong the material science and engineering research community is at the university. And it was clear to me after that experience that this was a place that I could really thrive in my research career and potentially have a big impact on the state.
Price: Well, let's talk about your research. You work on two-dimensional materials. Just sort of in layman's terms, that seems easy to understand in everyday life. When we say something's two-dimensional, it's flat. It doesn't have volume. But I'm guessing when a physicist talks about 2D materials, it's something a little different from the common usage. So what is a 2D material in your world in physics?
Churchill: It really is a material that is at the atomic limit of thickness. So it's just one or a few atoms thick. The way that that's possible, you could think of it with an analogy like a ream of paper. So you have a stack of papers. And within each individual sheet in the stack, the paper is relatively strong. It's also easy to pick up one sheet of paper and remove it from the stack.
And it turns out that there are crystals. Actually, thousands of them that have an atomic structure that's like that, where the chemical bonds are very strong within the two-dimensional plane, but they're relatively weak above and below that plane. And so it is actually possible to peel a single atomic layer of that material off of the stack, or because of the atomic arrangement of those materials, the materials can actually be grown directly as a single atomic sheet.
Price: Just the idea that you are making materials no thicker than an atom is just frankly, amazing. Why are you doing this? I mean, other than just doing something amazing and showing you can do it. What is the purpose of making these materials in your lab and other labs? Why are you growing them and producing them?
Churchill: Something that happens generically when material is reduced down to this atomic limit of thickness is that the properties of the material change, sometimes dramatically. And whenever material properties are different, there are different technological applications that could potentially emerge from those new properties. In my lab and in others in this area at the university, we're interested in a dual approach of trying to both understand the basic material science of how those properties change, what are the new properties, but also thinking about what kinds of technologies could those new properties potentially enable?
Price: Let's talk about that because we always like to hear about the practical applications. Well, those of us who aren't physicists, I mean, it's easier for us to grasp. So are these materials used today? How are they used and how do you see them being used in the future?
Churchill: I think that the current applications of two-dimensional materials are relatively limited, and that's because of the difficulty of manufacturing them. And that's something that we could talk more about later, how we're trying to address that problem here at the university. The future applications are very bright, and one of the most promising ones that we're pursuing in my lab and more broadly in the research community of the MonArk NSF Quantum Foundry, are quantum technology applications of 2D materials.
Price: Well, let's talk about the Arkansas Materials Institute. You're the director. It just recently launched. How important and established is material science here at the University of Arkansas?
Churchill: It is extremely important and well established, and that's really no accident. It's the result of many decades of effort by a lot of people on campus. But I think the person who deserves the most credit for that is my mentor, Greg Salamo, whom I mentioned earlier. For decades, he worked tirelessly to boost the quality and quantity of material science engineering research on campus to the point where now, if you look around at the departments of physics and chemistry and many of the departments in the College of Engineering, and you look at who are the most active and successful researchers in those departments. In a lot of cases, they're actually doing material science and engineering research.
Price: What is the Arkansas Materials Institute? What does an institute do at a university? And what is this particular institute?
Churchill: The Arkansas Materials Institute brings together interdisciplinary researchers across a broad variety of fields. Because the properties of materials and the applications of materials are so varied. There are contributions to that research that can be made from physics and chemistry, as I mentioned, but also electrical engineering and computer science. Even now with AI figuring into discovery of new materials, chemical engineering and more. And it's one of the real strengths of the institute is bringing together these very diverse disciplines to look at different angles of a problem and make progress.
Price: And I know there's also an educational component. You have a graduate program. Talk to me about what that involves and what's new there.
Churchill: For more than 20 years, we've had an interdisciplinary graduate program in materials science and engineering. It started out as microelectronics and photonics. And at the same time, we've had a research arm of materials science and engineering on campus, which was the Institute for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, or Nano Institute. The Arkansas Materials Institute is really a merger of the education part, the graduate program and the research part, the Nano Institute. And we think that that merger is super important to the future success of the institute, because research and education go hand in hand in making new discoveries, but also training the next generation of scientists and engineers.
An excerpt from the most recent episode of the podcast Short Talks From The Hill. Todd Price spoke with University of Arkansas physicist and director of the new Arkansas Materials Institute, Hugh Churchill, about materials science research. To learn more about Churchill's work, you can visit kuaf.com/talks.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
