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What if the technologies of the future are built from materials we haven't even made yet? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Lilia Xie, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University, to explore the world of quantum materials, where the arrangement of atoms, the energy of electrons, and even the angle between atomic layers can transform a material from insulator to metal to superconductor.

Lilia takes Aaron on a wide-ranging tour through two-dimensional materials, transition metal dichalcogenides, moiré superlattices, and the frontier of molecular intercalation, where her lab is slipping organic molecules between layers of inorganic crystals to tune properties no periodic table combination could produce on its own. Along the way, they dig into how electrons flow through metals, why a crystal turned from red to black in her grad school lab, what unpaired electron spins have to do with your fridge magnet, and why sometimes the most surprising discoveries come from simply cooking up something new and watching what happens.

About the Guest

Lilia Xie is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University, where her lab develops emerging quantum materials for next-generation memory devices, quantum computers, and advanced electronics. She grew up in New Jersey and returned to Princeton as faculty after completing her undergraduate degree in chemistry there in 2014 (with certificates in Materials Science and Engineering and Musical Performance), earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry at MIT in 2020 under Prof. Mircea Dincă, where she explored electrically conductive metal-organic frameworks, and completing a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Prof. D. Kwabena Bediako as an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow and L'Oreal USA for Women in Science Fellow, where she studied complex magnetism in intercalation compounds. Her lab works on low-dimensional inorganic materials and investigates how inserting molecular components between atomic layers can precisely tune electrical, magnetic, and optical properties.

Connect with Lilia

Xie Lab: https://liliaxie.chemistry.princeton.edu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilia-s-xie/
X / Twitter: https://x.com/lilia_xie

Chapters

00:00 – Cold Open: Quantum Materials and the Invisible Suit
02:00 – Meet Lilia Xie
02:40 – What Are Materials, Really?
03:45 – Inorganic Materials, Metals, and Quantum Properties
05:26 – Transition Metal Dichalcogenides: The MoS2 Family
08:35 – 2D Layers, Sandwiches, and Electron Delocalization
11:50 – Moiré Superlattices: A New Length Scale From a Twist
17:00 – How Electrons Know Their Environment Is Changing
24:32 – Orbitals, Energy States, and the Basics of Quantum Mechanics
33:28 – Tantalum Disulfide and the Three Buckets of Materials
37:38 – How Metals Conduct: A Continuum of Energy States
43:24 – What Lilia Is Actually After: Molecular Intercalation
51:10 – Molecules Between the Layers: Infinite Tunability
54:46 – Early Lab Life: Growing Crystals Without Answers Yet
1:05:44 – The Red Crystal That Turned Black
1:21:02 – Room Temperature Superconductivity and the Future of Computing
1:23:20 – Where Magnetism and Electricity Become the Same Thing

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Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
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