Stephan Roche

Stephan Roche

Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia

Engineering Sciences

ICREA Prof. Stephan Roche is working at the Catalan Institute of Nanosciences and Nanotechnology-ICN2 and BIST. He leads the "Theoretical and Computational Nanoscience" group which focuses on physics of Dirac materials (graphene & topological insulators) and 2D materials-based van der Waals heterostructures. He pioneered the development of linear scaling quantum transport approaches enabling simulations of billion atoms-scale disordered models.  He studied Theoretical Physics at ENS and got PhD (1996) at Grenoble University (France); worked in Japan, Spain & Germany; was appointed as assistant Prof. in 2000, CEA Researcher in 2004 and joined ICREA in 2009. He received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). 


Research interests

S. Roche and his group theoretically explore exotic quantum transport in Dirac Matter including graphene and topological insulators, and 2D materials-based van der Waals heterostructures. Main current interests include (i) quantum interferences and decoherence mechanisms in presence of electron-phonon coupling and spin-orbit interaction, (ii) spin dynamics and spin-torque phenomena in van der Waals heterostructures, (iii) topological effects in Dirac Matter (iv) thermal transport and thermoelectricity in two-dimensional materials (v) quantum devices simulation and (vi) quantum technologies (quantum computing and entanglement in many body physics). Roche´s group has developed unrivalled quantum transport methodologies allowing the study of realistic models of disordered materials up to relevant technology and industrial scales.

Selected publications

- Garcia JH, Vila M, Hsu CH, Waintal X, Pereira VM & Roche S 2020 , ‘Canted Spin Texture and Quantum Spin Hall Effect in WTe2’, Physical Review Letters 125, 256603.

- Vila M, Garcia JH, Cummings AW, Power SR, Groth C, Waintal X & Roche S 2020 ´Nonlocal Spin Dynamics in the Crossover from Diffusive to Ballistic Transport´, Physical Review Letters 124, 196602.

- de Moraes BG, Cummings A & Roche S 2020, 'Emergence of intraparticle entanglement and time-varying violation of Bell's inequality in Dirac matter', Physical Review B, 102, 4, 041403.

- Hong S, Lee C, Lee MH, Lee Y, Ma KY, Kim G, Yoon SI, Ihm K, Kim KJ, Shin TJ, Kim SW, Jeon EC, Jeon H, Kim JY, Lee Z, Antidormi A, Roche S, Chhowalla M, Shin HJ & Shin HS 2020, 'Ultralow-dielectric-constant amorphous boron nitride', Nature 582, 511–514    

- Benítez LA, Savero Torres W, Sierra JF, Timmermans M, Garcia JH, Roche S, Costache MV & Valenzuela SO 2020, 'Tunable room-temperature spin galvanic and spin Hall effects in van der Waals heterostructures', Nature Materials  19, 170–175.

- Kim G , Ma KY, Park M, Kim M, Jeon J, Song J, Barrios-Vargas JE, Sato Y, Lin YC, Suenaga K, Roche S, Yoo S, Sohn BH, Jeon S & Suk Shin H 2020, ‘ Blue emission at atomically sharp 1D heterojunctions between graphene and h-BN’, Nature Communications 11, 359.

- Savero Torres W,  Sierra JF , Benítez LA, Bonell F,  García JH, Roche S & Valenzuela SO 2020, 'Magnetism, spin dynamics, and quantum transport in two-dimensional systems', MRS Bulletin 45, Issue 5 (Emergent Quantum Materials), 357-365.

- Morresi ,T Binosi D, Simonucci S, Piergallini R, Roche S, Pugno NM & Simone T 2020, ´ Exploring event horizons and Hawking radiation through deformed graphene membranes´ 2D Mater. 7, 041006.


Selected research activities

Leader of Spintronics Workpackage of the Graphene Flagship.

Coordinator of LSQuant " Linear Scaling Quantum Transport" platform (http://www.lsquant.org/).