Examples include the invention of bronze tools after the stone age, the displacement of bronze by iron, the development of the metallurgy of steel and aluminum that has been stimulated by and has fueled the industrial revolution, and the optimization and surface passivation of silicon that enabled much of the multibillion-dollar technological sector in the present day. Throughout human history, major advances in technology have been usually accompanied by a revolution in materials.

This issue summarizes and reviews recent progress in selected topics, and also provides perspective for the future directions of emergent quantum materials in the years to come. This thriving research field has witnessed a number of seminal breakthroughs and is now poised to rise to the challenges in a new age of quantum information science and technology. Over the past decade, much research effort has been devoted to the development of quantum materials with phenomena and functionalities that manifest at high temperature and feature unprecedented tunability with atomic-scale precision. The field of quantum materials has been a topical area of modern materials science for decades, and is at the center stage of a wide range of modern technologies, ranging from electronics, photonics, energy, defense, to environmental and biomedical sensing. Some key characteristics include reduced dimensionality, strong many-body interactions, nontrivial topology, and noncharge state variables of charge carriers. The term quantum materials refers to materials whose properties are principally defined by quantum mechanical effects at macroscopic length scales and that exhibit phenomena and functionalities not expected from classical physics.

Emergent phenomena in 2d materials ppt