Pablo Jarillo-Herrero wins BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award | MIT Information

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, has received the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for “discoveries concerning the ‘magic angle’ that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled.”

He shares the 400,000-euro award with Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin. According to the BBVA Foundation, “the pioneering work of the two physicists has achieved both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a new field where superconductivity, magnetism, and other properties can be obtained by rotating new two-dimensional materials like graphene.” Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms organized in hexagons resembling a honeycomb construction.

Theoretical basis, experimental validation

In a theoretical mannequin printed in 2011, MacDonald predicted that on twisting two graphene layers at a given angle, of round 1 diploma, the interplay of electrons would produce new rising properties.
 
In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero delivered the experimental affirmation of this “magic angle” by rotating two graphene sheets in a manner that remodeled the fabric’s habits, giving rise to new properties like superconductivity.

The physicists’ work “has opened up new frontiers in physics by demonstrating that rotating matter to a given angle allows us to control its behavior, obtaining properties that could have a major industrial impact,” defined award committee member María José García Borge, a analysis professor on the Institute for the Structure of Matter. “Superconductivity, for example, could bring about far more sustainable electricity transmission, with virtually no energy loss.”

Almost science fiction

MacDonald’s preliminary discovery had little speedy impression. It was not till some years later, when it was confirmed within the laboratory by Jarillo-Herrero, that its true significance was revealed. 

“The community would never have been so interested in my subject, if there hadn’t been an experimental program that realized that original vision,” observes MacDonald, who refers to his co-laureate’s achievement as “almost science fiction.”

Jarillo-Herrero had been intrigued by the attainable results of putting two graphene sheets on high of one another with a exact rotational alignment, as a result of “it was uncharted territory, beyond the reach of the physics of the past, so was bound to produce some interesting results.”

But the scientist was nonetheless not sure of methods to make it work within the lab. For years, he had been stacking collectively layers of the super-thin materials, however with out with the ability to specify the angle between them. Finally, he devised a manner to take action, making the angle smaller and smaller till he acquired to the “magic” angle of 1.1 levels at which the graphene revealed some extraordinary habits.

“It was a big surprise, because the technique we used, though conceptually straightforward, was hard to pull off in the lab,” says Jarillo-Herrero, who can also be affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.

Since 2009, the BBVA has given Frontiers of Knowledge Awards to greater than a dozen MIT college members. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize classes, acknowledge world-class analysis and cultural creation and purpose to have fun and promote the worth of information as a world public good. The BBVA Foundation works to help scientific analysis and cultural creation, disseminate information and tradition, and acknowledge expertise and innovation.