Dr. Benjamin Levitan

Benjamin Levitan’s research on the theory of quantum devices and materials led to a PhD in physics from McGill University in Canada. His post-graduate career has been funded by respected grants including the FRQNT fellowship, awarded by Quebec’s scientific funding agency, and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Post-Graduate Scholarship.

During the pandemic, Dr. Levitan initiated and organized a highly successful seminar series for students and faculty from throughout Quebec’s condensed matter physics community. This allowed friends and colleagues to remain updated on each other’s work, and to maintain personal connections.

At Weizmann Institute of Science, Dr. Levitan is making strides in the growing field of quantum materials research, which seeks to extend our understanding and control of electronic behavior. The semiconductor revolution, and the technologies it has enabled, resulted from understanding the quantum mechanics of a single¬ electron, or a few of them. Today, researchers studying quantum materials are concerned with the fundamentally new effects and material properties which emerge from the interactions between many electrons. Specifically, Dr. Levitan focuses on novel collective effects in unconventional superconductors made from atomically thin layers bound together by weak van der Waals forces.

As a global center of excellence in condensed matter physics, Weizmann Institute of Science is home to both theorists and experimentalists, fostering opportunities for collaborators to translate theoretical ideas into real experiments, and for experiments to inspire new theories. Dr. Levitan hopes his fundamental research eventually paves the way for new families of materials with valuable technological applications.