I work in Jim Eisenstein’s group, where we explore the properties of various kinds of low dimensional electronic matter — we help put the “M” in IQIM. The specific system I study is a two-dimensional sheet of electrons that lives in a layered semiconductor structure. Imagine a layer cake of various semiconducting materials (gallium arsenide and aluminum gallium arsenide), and in one of these layers electrons are trapped in 2-dimensions. We subject this system to temperatures very near absolute zero (about 10 millikelvin) and large magnetic fields (up to 16 Tesla), and under these conditions this 2-d electron sheet is a highly quantum system. That’s interesting from two different perspectives. On the quantum information side, there are potentially ways to manipulate the electrons to perform tasks for quantum computation that might be protected from some of the random noise that can come in from outside and cause decoherence. Another big part of what we want to do is to understand, from a fundamental physics perspective, what happens in a system like this, in which quantum mechanics is extremely important. You take a bunch of electrons and cool them to very low temperatures and subject them to strong magnetic fields — what do they do? The interactions between electrons become very important, and they can form new quantum mechanical states of matter, and those are the ones we want to understand.