Chan Si Min receives faculty award for graduate research

Chan Si Min (centre) is pictured with advisors Berge Englert (left) and George Batrouni (right) raising a toast to her Best Graduate Researcher Award 2023.

For her theoretical and computational work on the electronic structure of superconductors, PhD student Chan Si Min has received the Best Graduate Researcher Award 2023 in the Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore. The prizes were announced at a faculty event on 27 July.

Si Min’s advisor is George Batrouni, a Visiting Research Professor at CQT from the University of Côte d'Azur in France. They are both members of the group of CQT Distinguished Fellow Berge Englert.

The trio were at a conference in France when the award ceremony happened, so celebrated remotely (pictured). George says it is his good fortune to work with Si Min: “She approaches her work with great enthusiasm, does not get discouraged, and has obtained so many fascinating results. I have learnt so much from her. She fully merits this award.”

Si Min studies how electrons pair up and behave in the superconducting state in materials that have flat band structure, meaning that charges are expected to move only very slowly. It is thought that flat bands could support superconductivity at higher temperatures, making for more useful materials.

“The models I design and characterise can serve as guides for future experimental realisations,” Si Min explains. She has run density matrix renormalisation group calculations on supercomputers provided by the National Supercomputing Centre Singapore and derived a multi-band mean field theory.

Si Min enrolled in the Department of Physics’ graduate programme after earning a Double Degree in Physics and Materials Science and Engineering at NUS. “Si Min's outstanding performance as a NUS undergraduate was recognised by awarding her a President's Graduate Fellowship. She understood very well that the fellowship comes with a ‘now earn it’ challenge, and she lived up to that splendidly,” says Berge.  

Her research has already had external impact. Si Min has co-authored two papers on superconductivity in flat band systems that were published in 2022 in Physical Review B. She also spent three months this year as a visiting researcher at the Institute for Basic Science, in Daejeon, South Korea, at the invitation of the Director of its Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems. She is now in the final year of her PhD.