Chris Regan, UCLA professor of physics, has been honored as an American Physical Society Fellow. His work has advanced the capabilities of in situ transmission electron microscopy, liquid-cell microscopy and nanometer-scale thermometry, and facilitated improvements in areas including computer memories and batteries, in both research and industrial applications.

Regan is a condensed matter physicist who studies the overlap between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics; he is also constructing a model system for clean energy harvesting. His areas of research include carbon nanotubes, graphene, nanofabrication and in situ electron microscopy. His group at UCLA develops new metrology tools for studying microfabricated, electronically activated systems with electron microscopes.

For his doctoral research, he built a machine that measured the electric dipole moment of the electron. Any nonzero value would indicate the electron is not perfectly spherical -- and help explain why the universe contains lots of matter and basically no antimatter. At the time, Regan's experiment set a new best limit on the electron's deviation from perfection.

"The end result wasn't especially exciting but measuring zero carefully taught me a lot," Regan said.

His group has recently been studying different materials that might form the basis for next-generation computer memories. Current technologies such as solid-state hard drives and flash memory store bits based on the motion of electrons. The same data might be stored by moving atoms instead, which would make the memory elements smaller, cheaper and more robust. Regan's group is developing methods to see and better understand how atoms can be induced to move back and forth reproducibly inside solid-state memory elements.