Spanish physicist Pablo Jarillo-Herrero eyes Nobel Prize for graphene breakthrough at MIT

The grand staircase at MIT's main entrance, flanked by Ionic columns, becomes a stage for graduation photographs in late May. Students in formal dress pose with their stoles, marking the end of a course, a degree, a doctorate at what multiple rankings consider the world's most prestigious university. Cambridge, Massachusetts, separated from Boston by the Charles River, has become the global epicenter of academic excellence. Within a twenty-minute walk lies Harvard. Nearby are Lesley University and Cambridge College. The formula for this concentration of brilliance hangs on a sign in MIT's lobby: excellence plus curiosity. More than a hundred Nobel Prize winners have emerged from this institute's laboratories and classrooms since its founding in 1861. The next laureate could be a Spanish physicist named Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, who will turn fifty next Thursday.

Jarillo-Herrero revolutionized the field of new materials in 2018 from his laboratory at MIT. His experiments with what he calls the magic angle of graphene—a two-dimensional carbon material that is flexible, extraordinarily thin, and remarkably strong—showed that this substance could adopt the behavior of virtually any other material. The discovery has placed him among serious candidates for the Nobel Prize. "Since 2018, I can no longer say it's impossible," he says while walking down what MIT calls the infinite corridor, the main artery of the campus. "But of course it's not guaranteed." He leads the way to his newly occupied office, still unpacked, where a window frames a sapling grown from a cutting of Newton's historic apple tree. On the shelves sit prestigious awards, including the Wolf Prize, and this year a new recognition: the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in Basic Sciences, which he shares with Canadian physicist Allan MacDonald, who in 2011 laid the theoretical foundations for the magic angle and gave it its name.

Jarillo-Herrero comes from a humble family. His parents began working at sixteen and seventeen without university education. He is the only scientist among fifty extended family members. Hard work was instilled from childhood. He received his degree in physics from the University of Valencia in 1999, earned a master's from UC San Diego, and a doctorate from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University under Philip Kim, a world authority on graphene, MIT invited him to apply for a faculty position. He had promised his wife, Empar Rollano—also a physicist from Valencia—that they would stay in the United States for two or three years before returning to Spain. But the MIT offer changed everything. "It was like Real Madrid wanting to sign you and you say no," he recalls. He convinced her by framing it as a seven-year assistant professor contract. "After that, they do a very harsh evaluation. In my time, they fired half the professors who hadn't achieved the expected success. I thought I wouldn't stay, but in 2015 I became tenured and in 2018, full professor. It's been eighteen years and my wife still holds it against me," he says, laughing.

The magic angle discovery emerged from unexpected territory. Graphene is normally a conductor, neither insulator nor superconductor. When you place one layer of graphene atop another and rotate it by exactly 1.1 degrees, something extraordinary happens: the speed of electrons drops nearly to zero, and the material begins exhibiting unusual quantum behaviors. "I was looking for something and found something completely different and much bigger than I expected," Jarillo-Herrero explains. He describes the magic angle as an inverted philosopher's stone. Medieval alchemists sought a stone that would turn everything it touched into gold. Magic-angle graphene works in reverse: by manipulating geometry alone, he can transform all-carbon material into an insulator, a superconductor, a magnetic material, a ferroelectric material—essentially any known phase of matter. His 2018 paper describing this breakthrough became the most-cited study that year across all Nature journals.

Yet fabricating a magic-angle graphene device remains artisanal work. A single device takes between two and six weeks to construct, depending on complexity. His team has evolved to work with more than two rotated layers; one recent device contained twelve. "My students are like medieval monks making something precious and unique," he says. "We still don't know how to make many at once." The practical applications remain years away. Graphene itself, first synthesized in 2004 at Manchester University by Russian-origin physicists André Geim and Konstantin Novoselov—who won the Nobel in 2010—has proven difficult to integrate into production chains. "It will take one to two decades," Jarillo-Herrero estimates. But he sees niche applications in defense, security, and space technology, where cost matters less than performance. Potential uses include ultrasensitive infrared or terahertz sensors for astronomy and satellites, neuromorphic computing inspired by the brain's architecture for artificial intelligence, and topologically robust quantum computers with electrically tunable qubits.

His laboratory currently houses eleven doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, though it has held as many as twenty. Most are Asian, particularly from China. A Spanish student begins in September. "Two-thirds of them are much more intelligent than I am, and they teach me more than I teach them, especially after six months," he says. He doesn't force anything, but the motivation is intense. "I tell them that being at MIT is like being at the Olympics. You decide how hard you work, but then you won't get the medal. People come here for gold and give everything." The culture of effort is deeply embedded. Students typically work more than sixty hours weekly. Jarillo-Herrero himself has worked between sixty and eighty hours for most of his career, though now he aims for fifty to sixty. "You can work twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year if you want," he notes. "It's rare to find a student doing less than sixty hours weekly."

Jarillo-Herrero lives on campus with his family in a spacious home overlooking the Charles River, serving as a residential advisor. He and his wife have three children: Marta, fifteen, and twins María and David, eleven. They follow Mediterranean diet in an American schedule. He cooks—his hobbies include baking, dancing, squash, and recently rock climbing with his family at the gym. "We lead a normal life, though I travel a lot and what seems normal to us perhaps isn't," he reflects. Most friends are professional colleagues, some met through the children's school. "Many of us are foreigners because we all tend to gather together. They're our family here, and we help each other."

As he approaches fifty, several universities have tried to recruit him, including Princeton with what he calls a stratospheric offer. He chose to stay at MIT partly because the institute offered him the opportunity to help Spain in science and technology. "I've always felt committed to my country and aspired to do things there, though it's not easy because of bureaucracy," he says. One of his dreams is to create a prestigious university in Spain modeled on MIT. "Our country has the potential to attract international talent, but it would require massive investment and radical meritocracy. You have to recruit the best and offer good conditions for research, good salaries, good personal conditions." On the day of our visit, he will give a talk to Latin American entrepreneurs, then fly to Spain to serve on the jury for the Rei Jaume I Awards in his native Valencia.