Motivated by the thrill of discovery
There are many kinds of frustration. There’s the kind of frustration of electrons in some materials at extremely low temperatures that forces them to abandon their preference for classical states such as spin up or spin down and instead enter unusual states of quantum superposition — a favorite subject of MIT Pappalardo Fellow in physics Itamar Kimchi. Then there is the kind of scientific frustration when a research path down which one travels trying to explain these phenomena turns into a dead end. “Especially in the kind of work I do, you don’t know what the research problem is until you’ve solved it, because you are exploring with a flashlight in the dark things that you only understand once you’ve finished exploring them, that you didn’t even know were there until you’ve understood them,” says Kimchi, who works closely as a postdoc with professor of physics Senthil Todadri. “One of the things people...