Invisible Forces: Hidden Magnets to Black Holes

My research explores how to recycle lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from phones to electric vehicles. As these batteries age, they create a growing waste problem - but they also contain valuable materials like lithium and cobalt. Traditional recycling methods are energy-intensive or produce hazardous waste. I focus on “direct recycling,” a method that restores battery materials for reuse. As a “Battery Doctor,” I diagnose degraded batteries and prescribe lithium to bring them back to life more sustainably.

Black holes are regions of gravity so extreme that not even light can escape. When two of them collide, they leave behind a distinctive fingerprint: a gravitational wave - a faint distortion in the fabric of spacetime - that travels across the Universe. A decade after the first observation, gravitational‑wave astronomy has reshaped how we study black holes. In this talk, I will discuss how detectors measure these signals, what ten years of discoveries have revealed about their origins, evolution, and cosmic role, and what future observations may uncover.

You are surely familiar with ferromagnets, for example, fridge magnets. In antiferromagnets, there are magnetic moments in individual lattice sites, but adjacent magnetic moments point in opposite directions, so you cannot feel when you pick up a sample that it is magnetic. In this talk, I will discuss the antiferromagnet PdCrO2. What is unusual about this material is that it has a triangular lattice. Antiferromagnetism on a triangular lattice always has a more complicated structure than on a square or a cubic lattice, because it is impossible to make a simple up-down-up-down arrangement of magnetic moments. I will discuss why this material is magnetic, how we can manipulate its magnetism, and how the magnetic order manages to arrange itself on a triangular lattice.