The Department of Energy has awarded an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) to UF. The application, spearheaded by UF physics professor, Hai-Ping Cheng, is funded at the level of $10.5M over four years. DOE awarded 42 new EFRC?s in its latest solicitation, and UF?s was the only one led by an institution in Florida; it becomes one of only two centers in the whole state. It is called the Center for Molecular Magnetic Quantum Materials (M2QM), and began officially on August 1, 2018. The center involves UF Chemistry (George Christou, John Stanton), Physics (Hai-Ping Cheng, Art Hebard, Neil Sullivan, Samuel Trickey, Xiaoguang Zhang), and MSE (Richard Hennig), as well as Caltech, the NHMFL (FSU and Los Alamos National Lab), and UCF. EFRC?s are established to target the DOE Office of Science?s basic research aims, which are to develop future technologies for the grand challenges of an energy-demanding world. M2QM targets quantum magnetic materials at the molecular scale, i.e., nanoscale magnetic materials possessing various exotic quantum properties important to new 21st century technologies, including quantum tunneling of magnetization, and quantum superposition and entanglement states.
