Heard on Campus: Lukas Muechler on quantum materials

“Quantum materials has emerged as a field recently as current devices are approaching their quantum limit,” said Lukas Muechler, assistant professor of chemistry and physics. Muechler recently spoke at Ashtekar Frontiers of Science, an annual public lecture series held by the Penn State Eberly College of Science, on the field of quantum materials.

In his presentation, Muechler described how he combines physics and chemistry in his quantum materials research. He works to tackle the challenge of “translating these concepts that theoretical physicists come up with into a language of chemistry,” by considering it, “not only a scientific challenge, but also a cultural challenge.”

Muechler ended his lecture by sharing that, “the cool thing about this interdisciplinary, broad science is that you make very human connections because you get to visit different countries, meet new people, and learn to think about a problem, like quantum materials, from so many angles,” and that, “quantum mechanics, quantum materials is the best field to do interdisciplinary science in.”

The 2025 Ashtekar Lecture series celebrates 100 years of quantum mechanics and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization International Year of Quantum Science and Technology with lectures that explore the depth and breadth of quantum research at Penn State and beyond.

Muechler was introduced by Ken Knappenberger, department head and professor of chemistry.

There are four lectures remaining in this year’s series. On Feb. 8, Xiantao Li will present “What can quantum computing do for scientific computing?” On Feb. 15, Marcos Rigol will present “A tale of two gases: Classical and quantum,” on Feb. 22, Abhinav Kandala will present “Accurate quantum computing,” and finally, on Mar. 1, Jun Zhu will present “Building a quantum information highway network with topological edge states.”