Charlie Kane Named a Simons Investigator

Charlie Kane has been honored by being named a Simons Investigator in the inaugural year of the program by the Simons Foundation. The award, which starts on August 1, is accompanied by $660,000 in funding over a five-year period. Charlie is being recognized for having created a large and vibrant research field focused on the search for and measurement of topologically non-trivial materials, including materials that are topologically non-trivial as a result of broken symmetries. His recent work has turned towards applications, for example using interfaces between topological insulators and ordinary superconductors to achieve a solid state realization of Majorana fermions, and exploring possible applications of these excitations in topological quantum computing.