Many of today’s technologies depend on our understanding of quantum mechanics: the drives that store your documents, the superconductors in MRI machines, the LEDs in our screens and the lasers in barcode scanners. Consequently, the UK government recently invested £270 million in developing a new generation of quantum technologies, expected to have applications across future multi-billion-pound industries. These include: quantum sensors, quantum computers and superconductors, to name a few. Nonetheless, advances on this front require the development of robust components: efficient low temperature systems, high vacuum equipment and more. My work involves systematic analysis of promising materials which may find implementations in the first of the above. Concretely, I study materials undergoing quantum phase transitions, the quantum analogue of normal phase transitions, of which water boiling is an example. The quantum aspect comes into play when a system is cooled to temperatures close to 0 Kelvin, or -273.15 ‘C, and a tuning parameter such as pressure is used to induce the transition. In this regime, quantum effects, which are obscured in normal conditions, become manifest. Finally, apart from immediate applications, the study of quantum phase transitions is interesting as some suggest a possible link to the physics of black holes.