Our logo was designed by current student Dewan Chowdhury, who won our logo design competition. He explains how the design came about.
My goal was to think of a graphic to represent CMP in a non-cliché and memorable way.
I believe my logo achieves this by using a snowflake inside an outward-curved square. The snowflake represents low temperature; the curved square indicates high pressure inside a system. For any substance within a system, sufficiently lowering the temperature and raising the pressure causes the substance to transition to its condensed matter state (if it’s not already in this state). In the foreground, the snowflake is formed with solid circles and lines to allude to strongly interacting atoms – a key feature of condensed matter. In the background, open circles and lines are used to give the design a technological impression, suggesting that CMP and technology are intimately connected.