I studied experimental physics at Caltech. My research explores thermopower as a probe of strongly-correlated quantum electron systems.

PhD 2016

Life in a lab

From 2006 to 2012 most of my days were spent in a Caltech sub-basement working in Prof. Jim Eisenstein's lab fabricating semiconductor devices, cooling them to sub-Kelvin temperatures within cryostats, constructing circuits to measure the most delicate signals, writing software to automate data acquisition and regulate experimental parameters, writing more software to analyze experimental data, solving physics problems on white boards, and machining custom parts for future experiments.

My Research

When a metal or any other electron system is subjected to a temperature gradient, a voltage will appear. This is known as the thermoelectric effect and the ratio of the voltage to temperature difference is known as thermopower. It so happens that this thermopower is often proportional to a system's entropy, a very informative thermodynamic quantity. My research exploits this fact by using thermopower to probe some of the most exotic many-body quantum states that are known.

One of these states, known as the fractional quantum Hall state at filling factor ν=5/2, is believed to exhibit quantum exchange statistics that could be harnessed for the creation of a particularly robust type of quantum computer. Consequently, there is a great deal of interest within the scientific community in establishing whether this state indeed obeys these quantum statistics. It was recently predicted that due to these quantum statistics the ν=5/2 state should have an enhanced entropy compared to otherwise similar states. One goal of my work is to measure this entropy enhancement via thermopower.

Download my dissertation

My Publications

Thermoelectric response of fractional quantized Hall and reentrant insulating states in the N = 1 Landau level
W.E. Chickering, J.P. Eisenstein, L.N. Pfeiffer, and K.W. West, Phys. Rev. B 87, 075302 (2013).

Thermopower of two-dimensional electrons at filling factors ν = 3/2 and 5/2
W.E. Chickering, J.P. Eisenstein, L.N. Pfeiffer, and K.W. West, Phys. Rev. B 81, 245319 (2010).

Hot-electron thermocouple and the diffusion thermopower of two-dimensional electrons in GaAs
W.E. Chickering, J.P. Eisenstein, and J.L. Reno, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 046807 (2009).