Two separate teams lead by Condensed Matter physicists Bellave Shivaram and Gia-Wei Chern have won awards in the recent round of funding from the 3Cavaliers program of the University’s Vice Provost for Research Office. The 3Cavaliers program selects proposals which involve the participation of three UVa faculty with the requirement that at least two different departments/schools be involved.  Each team was awarded $60,000 as seed money to start new projects.

Bellave Shivaram’s proposal on Helium droplet arrays to model Bose-Einstein Condensate lattices, combines the expertise of Kevin Lehmann (Chemistry) who has studied molecules entrapped in superfluid helium drops for many decades and Peter Schauss (Physics), an expert on optical lattices.   See https://3c.virginia.edu/projects/193 for more.

Gia-Wei Chern’s proposal, joined by Sergei Egorov (Chemistry) and Chris Paolucci (Chemical Engineering), aims at developing multi-scale modeling of metal-insulator transition dynamics in correlated electron materials.  See https://3c.virginia.edu/projects/229 for more.