Discoveries made in a new research partnership between the University of British Columbia and a German institution that has been the academic home of 32 Nobel prize winners will “profoundly change the lives of present and future generations,” said UBC president Stephen Toope on Monday.
UBC and the Max Planck Society announced an agreement to establish the Max Planck-UBC Centre for Quantum Materials, which will conduct joint research projects in both Canada and Germany through exchanges of professors and students.
The centre is to operate initially on $1 million in funding provided from the Max Planck Society, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Research and Education and a private endowment from UBC’s new Institute of Quantum Matter.
It is the third Max Planck centre to be established worldwide. The others, located in India and Spain, focus respectively on computer science research and European culture and religion. Another Max Planck centre is currently under construction in Florida.
Initially founded in 1914 as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society, the non-profit Max Planck Society takes its name from the man considered to be among the fathers of quantum physics.
UBC said in a release that engineers have succeeded over the past 50 years in developing smaller combinations of semiconductors, insulators and metals that function as electronic devices while maintaining their fundamental electronic properties.
Scientists in the joint research program will investigate advanced materials whose properties drastically change when combined with other advanced material at a quantum level.
UBC professor George Sawatzky, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Physics and Chemistry of Nano-structured Materials, will lead the university’s principal investigators in the research. Some of the research will be conducted using a synchrotron at UBC, which is a type of high-energy particle accelerator.
In a video posted on UBC’s website, Sawatzky provided additional insight into the work that the centre will undertake.
“Sometime ago we came up with the idea that perhaps if you take two materials, the interface between those two could develop completely new and different properties from either of the two materials,” he said. “And those properties could be extremely exciting.”