Dartmouth Engineering Professor Mattias Fitzpatrick Wins NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor of Engineering Mattias Fitzpatrick (Photo by Katie Lenhart)

Awarded through NSF's Division of Materials Research, the award supports Professor Fitzpatrick's work to "advance the understanding of atomic-scale defects that limit the performance of next-generation materials in quantum electronics," according to the project summary.

"This grant recognizes the promise of the spectroscopy technique my group has developed at Dartmouth to study materials in fundamentally new ways," said Fitzpatrick. "For the first time, our approach allows us to directly measure these defects—known as two-level system defects—that can absorb energy and create noise in materials at very low temperatures."

The measurement technique developed by Fitzpatrick, called "Broadband Cryogenic Transient Dielectric Spectroscopy" (BCTDS), enables direct probes of defects in quantum materials. "By connecting BCTDS measurements to how the materials are made and processed, we can then help identify which materials host harmful defects, the nature of such defects, and how to avoid them," he said. 

With this funding, Fitzpatrick also aims to develop resources that make advanced materials research more accessible to students, and help prepare them to work at the intersection of materials science and modern quantum engineering. These include interactive online modules, a podcast that highlights the people and processes behind the research, and an illustrated children's book that explains orders of magnitude and scale. The project will also produce open data sets, analysis tools, and teaching materials to make it easier for students, educators, and researchers to explore real data from quantum materials. 

"This work is made possible through the generous support of Thayer School of Engineering and the dedication of my researchers, Salil Bedkihal, Chris Wang, and Juan Salcedo-Gallo, among others," said Fitzpatrick. "I'm especially excited to use this funding to help students at Dartmouth learn to carefully and methodically discover new physics at the quantum scale, and to appreciate the power of a critical, scientific mind in our search for understanding the universe we inhabit."

Fitzpatrick earned his bachelor's in physics and mathematics from Middlebury College, and his PhD in electrical engineering (applied physics) from Princeton University where he worked with Professor Andrew Houck on superconducting circuits. He then received an Intelligence Community postdoctoral fellowship to work on quantum sensing in the lab of Nathalie de Leon at Princeton. From there, he went on to work on quantum computation at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center before joining the Dartmouth Engineering faculty in 2022.