A UT research effort funded by a $1.4 million donation from Love, Tito’s received its first material shipment in early October for a new machine that will allow the group to make progress studying the movement of electrons in atomically thin materials.

“These are promising materials for possible future technology, but we need to understand how electrons behave in these materials … to possibly control them and engineer them to boost the performance of certain technologies,” said Edoardo Baldini, assistant physics professor and lead researcher. 

According to the Love, Tito’s website, the nonprofit is a charitable extension of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, which UT alumnus Bert “Tito” Beveridge founded as a way to give back to the world. The donation will fund a preparation chamber to produce better nanomaterial samples and lasers to enable high-resolution videos of electron movement, Baldini said. Nanomaterials can have potential applications in quatum computing, microelectrics and solar cells, Baldini said. 

The new machine — consisting of the preparation chamber, a momentum microscope and the lasers — is called the Austin Universal Tool for Ultrafast Momentum Nanoscopy within the Love, Tito’s Quantum Materials Characterization Laboratory.

The lasers will work in two pulses, first to excite the electrons within the materials and then to probe the electrons, acting as a video camera with a resolution far better than human sight, Baldini said. Without this pulsed effect, the machine can only take still photographs.

“Tito’s generous gift will allow us to make movies, and so to (measure) one more dimension that is basically the time,” Baldini said. “This time is basically given by laser pulses that stimulate the (electron) dynamics, and then can probe it with a resolution of one millionth of a billionth of a second.”

Baldini said there are only five or six machines that can look at how electrons behave in nanomaterials in the world. He said he hopes to begin research in six months rather than his initial estimate of one year. 

“What we do is to build very complicated and complex instruments … to see the unseen, to see quantum effects that other people have not reported,” Baldini said.