On November 8th 2021, Dr. Marrazzo has received the Prof. René Wasserman Award 2021 (link https://actu.epfl.ch/news/professor-rene-wasserman-award-2021-antimo-marrazz/), that is awarded once every year for innovative and high-level research in the field of new materials. The ceremony took place at EPFL, Lausanne and the generous prize of 10’000 CHF is sponsored by the Wasserman family and TeroLab Surface Group SA. The motivation for the award reads: for charting the topological properties of all exfoliable non-magnetic materials, identifying 2D jacutingaite as the first example of a Kane-Mele quantum spin Hall insulator, and 3D jacutingaite as a dual-topology material - a prediction later confirmed by experiments. 

During his PhD at EPFL, Marrazzo has studied the electronic structure and its topology in the context of materials design and discovery. In particular, he focused on a specific class of materials, namely two-dimensional topological insulators. By coupling state-of-the-art first-principles simulations with materials’ informatics he has screened materials databases looking for novel two-dimensional topological insulators. In this search, he found novel candidates and provided a picture of the abundance of such materials in nature. In the process, he identified one outstanding candidate, jacutingaite, displaying fairly unique physical properties. He has unveiled the electronic structure of monolayer jacutingaite and showed its strong links with that of graphene. Monolayer jacutingaite in fact realises the topological physics of graphene, but at a much higher and more relevant energy scale, while retaining a richer interplay between spin-orbit coupling, crystal-symmetry breaking and dielectric response, that is potentially relevant for applications. He has also studied jacutingaite in its layered three-dimensional bulk form. He showed how bulk jacutingaite is a dual topological insulator, where a non-trivial coupling between graphene-like layers induces an additional topological crystalline order with protected (001)-surface states; this has been confirmed by experiments.

Marrazzo’s research in the field of electronic structure and topology of novel materials had already been recognised this year with the SAIS prize 2021, awarded by the Italian Embassy in Bern for the best STEM PhD 2021 among Italian-speaking doctoral students in Switzerland, and the 2020 EPFL Doctoral Program Thesis Distinction awarded to the 8% best PhD students of each EPFL doctoral school every year (link:https://www.epfl.ch/education/phd/edmx-materials-science-and-engineering/edmx-awards-laureates/).

References:

- A. Marrazzo, N. Marzari and M. Gibertini, Emergent dual topology in the three-dimensional Kane-Mele Pt2HgSe3, Phys. Rev. Research 2, 012063(R) Editors’ Suggestion (2020).

- I. Cucchi, A. Marrazzo, E. Cappelli, S. Riccò, F. Y. Bruno, S. Lisi, M. Hoesch, T. K. Kim, C. Cacho, C. Besnard, E. Giannini, N. Marzari, M. Gibertini, F. Baumberger, and A. Tamai, Bulk and surface electronic structure of the dual-topology semimetal Pt2HgSe3, Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 106402 (2020).

- A. Marrazzo, M. Gibertini, D. Campi, N. Mounet, N. Marzari, Abundance of Z2 topological order in exfoliable two-dimensional insulators, Nano Letters 19, 12 (2019).

- A. Marrazzo, M. Gibertini, D. Campi, N. Mounet and N. Marzari, Prediction of a large-gap and switchable Kane-Mele quantum spin Hall insulator, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 117701 (2018).