Songtian Zhang, Ph.D.

Songtian Sonia Zhang will be joining the Department of Physics at Columbia University as a postdoctoral research fellow in Professor Dmitri Basov’s group. Zhang obtained her bachelor’s in physics at the University of Waterloo and her Ph.D. from the Princeton University physics department under Professor Zahid Hasan. Zhang was also awarded the Kusaka Memorial Prize by this department for outstanding performance in research and professional promise.

Zhang’s research can be encompassed under the broader umbrella of quantum materials, with a specific focus on topology, superconductivity and exotic magnets. By combining a real space probe of the electronic structure with magnetic field perturbations, Zhang discovered new emergent phenomena including an unpredicted negative magnetism and a strong tunable control in a series of topological kagome magnets. Working with Professor Basov, Zhang plans to study the real space effects of topological superconductivity and emergent magnetism using a complementary technique of scanning near-field optics on a nanometer scale.