Boyu Qie was born and raised in Chengdu, China. In 2015, as the first graduating class of the South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTech), he received his B.S. summa cum laude in chemistry. In 2017, Boyu received his M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Columbia University. Currently, Boyu works in the research group of Professor Felix Fischer. His current research interests include the integration of synthetic and theoretical chemistry, experimental condensed matter physics, and nanofabrication techniques, among other areas.
For the Kavli ENSI program, Boyu aims to design, synthesize, characterize, and manipulate lower-dimensional materials with flat bands near the Fermi energy for exploration of strongly correlated physics. The flat band systems play a pivotal role in strongly correlated quantum many-body regimes with exotic electronic properties. Non-trivial flat bands exist for retaining the electron hopping dynamics, but the net hopping vanishes by destructive interference in a group of special theoretical lattices. In real materials, symmetry, hopping parameters, and hybridization of orbitals significantly affect the destructive interference. Considering the degree of flatness and the position of the bands, searching for lower-dimensional materials with intrinsic flat bands remains a major challenge. Since the chemical environment and coupling of spins determine the flat-band properties of real materials, selection of spin sources and lattice backbones becomes critical. Boyu proposes the design a series of custom-tailored linkers and metal cores for quasi-1D diamond lattices and 2D Lieb lattices in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to produce flat bands near the Fermi level, with the objective to explore the systems for novel correlated phenomena. The implementation of this research includes wet lab chemical synthesis, on-surface synthesis, scanning probe microscopy (SPM) and spectroscopy (SPS) characterization, device fabrication, and theory.