M. Polini, NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR and Scuola Normale Superiore, I-56126, Pisa (Italy)
Artificial honeycomb lattices offer a tunable platform to study massless Dirac quasiparticles and their topological and correlated phases. In this talk I will review recent progress in the design and fabrication of such synthetic structures focusing on nanopatterning of two-dimensional electron gases in ordinary semiconductors, molecule-by-molecule assembly by scanning probe methods, and optical trapping of ultracold atoms in crystals of light. I will emphasize how the interplay between single-particle band structure effects and inter-particle interactions leads to spectacular manifestations in tunneling and optical spectroscopies.
 Marco Polini is a Researcher at NEST, Istituto Nanoscienze-CNR and Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy). He graduated in 1999 from the University of Pisa and received his Ph.D. in January 2003 from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). Immediately after he went to work at the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Allan H. MacDonald until July 2003. In July 2003, he was hired at NEST as a tenure-track scientist until December 2008, when he became permanent staff. Dr. Polini has mainly worked on two-dimensional electron liquids and ultracold atoms trapped in low-dimensional geometries. He is a co-author of more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed international journals including Science, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, and Physical Review Letters. Since 2006 his work has mostly focused on the electronic properties of monolayer and bilayer graphene with particular emphasis on the role of electron-electron interactions.
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