Dr. Shantanu Mishra

Winner 2024

Shantanu Mishra’s research centres around bottom-up synthesis of carbon-based nanostructures and investigation of their electronic properties by means of scanning probe techniques. Through combining rational design principles and on-surface chemistry, he showed the generation of magnetism in purely organic molecules, and further demonstrated outstanding examples of many-body phenomena in individual molecules and molecular nanostructures on surfaces, such as magnetic bistability in polycyclic conjugated hydrocarbons, and emergence of fractional excitations and the Haldane phase (one of the cornerstone models of quantum magnetism) in molecular quantum spin chains. The research has been instrumental in demonstrating that the rational fabrication of organic molecular nanostructures on surfaces, when combined with the atomic resolution capabilities of scanning probe microscopy, constitutes a fertile platform to investigate low-dimensional magnetism and complex many-body physics at the atomic scale.