Johannes Pollanen

Endowed Chairs College of Natural Science

• Jerry Cowen Endowed Chair of Experimental Physics
• Established through a gift from Randolph Cowen and Elaine Cowen

• Physics and Astronomy

Bio

Johannes Pollanen, assistant professor and a Jerry Cowen Chair of Experimental Physics, is the principal investigator leading the Laboratory for Hybrid Quantum Systems (LHQS) at MSU. Pollanen's research group explores the fundamental physics and potential quantum information science applications of a variety of low dimensional quantum electronic materials and devices. The team uses a diverse set of experimental techniques to investigate quantum systems in order to reveal, and ultimately control, their properties.

Pollanen received his B.S. in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from Northwestern University. Before joining MSU in 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) at the California Institute of Technology. 

While at Northwestern, he discovered a new chiral quantum state of superfluid 3He, which he engineered by introducing anisotropic disorder to the superfluid in the form of high porosity silica aerogel. During his time at Caltech, he demonstrated a novel method for controlling the orientation of a class of 2d electronic liquid crystalline phases of matter that exist in ultra-clean semiconductor structures.