Meet Professor Susan Coppersmith FAA FAIP

From grains of sand to quantum computers

The AIP is delighted to announce that Professor Susan Coppersmith FAA FAIP, a theoretical physicist at UNSW Sydney, will tour Australia this year as the AIP’s 2024 Women in Physics Lecturer.

Susan has used principles of theoretical physics to understand a wide variety of systems ranging from sand to pearls to glasses to quantum dots used to make quantum computers.

Seashells, pearls and chalk are all made of calcium carbonate. Why are shells strong while chalk crumbles?

Susan has investigated how an organism makes seashells so strong by controlling the structure of a combination of brittle calcium carbonate with a small amount of soft organic material.

Better understanding of these processes enables scientists and engineers to combine brittle and flexible components to create new composite materials that are highly resistant to fracture.

Prof Coppersmith has studied granular materials, showing that the forces that support your weight when you stand on a beach are distributed very differently in sand than in a “normal” solid.

Forces much greater than the mean occur, but very large forces are exponentially rare.  Understanding these force variations is important for a variety of industrial processes that use granular materials.

Now she is working to predict how a combination of silicon and germanium, two materials used in current electronic technologies, can be used to fabricate quantum dots that could enable the creation of quantum computers.

This strategy has the advantage that it has the potential to leverage the investments that have been made for scaling up modern classical electronic devices to enable the manufacture of large-scale quantum computers.

And she’s exploring how these quantum devices could enable us to better study exploding stars and dark matter.

The Women In Physics Lecture tour celebrates and recognises women’s contributions in physics.

Prof Coppersmith is a theoretical condensed matter physicist who has made substantial contributions to the understanding of a broad range of subjects, including glasses, biominerals, granular materials, and quantum computers.

She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Institute of Physics, and the National Academy of Sciences in the USA. She is currently serving as Head of the School of Physics at UNSW Sydney.

Condensed matter physics is the study of materials, usually solids. It seeks to predict the collective properties of very large numbers of electrons, atoms, or molecules.

Tour dates and locations of Prof Coppersmith’s lecture series will be announced soon.