Biosketch
Eva Andrei holds a Board of Governors Professorship in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University. She is an experimental condensed matter physicist recognized for her work on low dimensional electron systems, including two-dimensional layers of electrons on helium and at the interface of semiconductor heterojunctions, vortices in superconductors. She is known particularly for her ground-breaking work on graphene, a one atom thick layer of crystalline Carbon with extraordinary electronic properties which stem from charge carriers that resemble massless neutrinos. Andrei graduated from Tel Aviv University with a degree in physics and received a doctorate in physics from Rutgers University in 1982. Following a post doctoral fellowship at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ, and a visiting position at CEA Saclay, France she joined the faculty of Rutgers University in 1987. Andrei is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds the Medal of Physics from CEA, a French government research organization. In 2010, she received the Rutgers Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research. Andrei is vice chair of the Condensed Matter and Materials Research Committee for the National Academies and serves on the editorial board of the journal Solid State Communications.
Research Interests
Andrei employs magneto-transport, scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, to elucidate the electronic properties of graphene and other 2-dimensional materials, and how they are affected by external perturbations such as magnetic field, charge impurities, boundaries and substrate materials. For example she and her group demonstrated that by suspending graphene so as to leave it unattached to a substrate it is possible to access the intrinsic properties of its unusual charge carriers. This led to the observation of the so called "fractional quantum Hall effect," providing a direct manifestation of unexpectedly strong electron- electron correlations in this material. In 2009, the AAAS journal Science cited these findings in its list of the year's 10 groundbreaking scientific achievements. Another example is the discovery by Andrei and her group of so-called "Van Hove singularities" in the band structure of stacked graphene layers. They showed that by superposing graphene layers so that their relative crystal orientation is twisted away from equilibrium it is possible to change in a controlled way the band structure, a property which is usually considered to be intrinsic to the chemical composition and crystal structure of a material.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
2013
Primary Section
Section 13: Physics
Secondary Section
Section 33: Applied Physical Sciences