User:Airen124/sandbox

Dragan Mihailovic is a Slovenian physicist, working as research scientist at the Jozef Stefan Institute, leading a research group on non-equilibrium studies of quantum materials. His pioneering achievements are in the field of temporal studies of electronic phase transitions, mainly superconductivity and electronic crystals. He is responsible for the discovery of a metastable quantum states in 1T-TaS2 that has led to development of ultraefficient and ultrafast memory devices. He has also performed pioneering research on fullerene ferromagnetism and was co-discoverer of molybdenum sulphur iodide nanowires and has major contributions in other areas of physics of quantum materials. He is currently acting director of the CENN Nanocenter, Professor of physics at the University of Ljubljana and the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School and Head of Department of Complex Matter at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Life and career
He was educated in the UK, the USA and Slovenia. Before starting college, he worked as a technician at the Department of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Oxford on the SAMS project of the Nimbus G satellite (Nimbus 6). He graduated in Physics at the University of Oxford, England (1979) as a member of Balliol College. He finished his doctorate in 1983 at the Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford on Raman spectroscopy of low-temperature electronic Jahn-Teller phase transitions in high magnetic fields. As a Fulbright scholar he spent 1989-90 at UC Santa Barbara, with Nobel laureate Alan J. Heeger, working on polaron physics in cuprates and conducting polymers. In 1995 he initiated time-resolved studies of high-temperature superconductors at the University of Oxford which he later developed and expanded further at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana. The main field of his research is the temporal evolution of single particle and collective excitations as well as topological defects through phase transitions, especially in superconductors and other electronically ordered systems. With his colleagues, he was the first to use time-resolved spectroscopy to investigate charge density wave, Jahn-Teller phase transitions and fullerene excitations. Together with co-workers he publish the first time-resolved measurements on pnictide superconductors. In 2014, he and his colleagues discovered a hidden topological quantum state in an electronic crystal under non-equilibrium conditions. Shortly thereafter, he patented and published a record-breaking fast memory device based on the discovered phenomenon. In 2018 he reported the discovery the of the quantum jamming phenomenon, a density-driven phase transition to an electonic Wigner glass. The pioneering work on high-temperature superconductors was published in a series of papers, including collaborations with Nobel laureates K. Alex Müller and Alan J. Heeger and an extensive review on time-resolved spetroscopy of high-temperature superconductors. With Viktor Kabanov and later Tomaž Mertelj, he worked on a polaronic model of high-temperature superconductivity, which is prominently cited in the introductory article to the book on high temperature superconductivity by Nobel laureates J. R. Schrieffer and K. A. Müller. He also published high-profile works in the field of nanotechnology, especially ferromagnetism in fullerene compounds, where with his colleagues he identified the mechanism for ferromagnetism and participated in the discovery and research of the Luttinger liquid properties of nanowires based on molybdenum, sulfur and iodine. He reported phase slip control in superconducting MoN nanowires by femtosecond laser pulses. In 1989 he reported the discovery of polar metals (with Alan J. Heeger) based on the pyroelectric, piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties of cuprates, which was later implemented in space applications.

At the "Jožef Stefan" Institute, he set up new laboratories for short-time spectroscopy, nanoelectronics and time-resolved multiprobe tunneling microscopy and an advanced quantum devices laboratory jointly with the CENN Nanocenter. Since 1985, he has been employed at the "Jožef Stefan" Institute, as scientific advisor. In 2002, he founded the Department for Complex Matter, which he still heads. He is director of the Center of Excellence for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (CENN), which he founded in 2004. In the years 2010-2020, he was the president of the scientific council of the "Jožef Stefan" Institute, and in 2016-2020, the president of the Society of Mathematicians, Physicists and Astronomers of Slovenia (DMFA). He has been a member of the Slovenian academy of engineers since 1995 and In 2021, he was elected as an extraordinary member of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

His current interest is the study of mesoscopic metastable quantum states created through non-equilibrium processes using time-resolved methods in combination with scanning tunnelling microscopy and charge configuration topological memory devices.

Awards and honors
In 2002, he won the Zois Prize for outstanding scientific achievements, in 1989 he won the Fulbright scholarship, in 1988 he was elected as a "Honorary members of the High Table", Christ Church College, Oxford, England. In 1986, he won the award of the Boris Kidrič Foundation. In 2012, he was the first in Slovenia to receive a subsidy from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced grant) in the field of phase transitions in time using femtosecond spectroscopy.