Ashvin Vishwanath | |
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Born | January 9, 1973 |
Nationality | Indian-American |
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Ashvin Vishwanath (born January 9,1973) is an Indian-American theoretical physicist known for important contributions to condensed matter physics. He is a professor of physics at Harvard University. [1]
Vishwanath was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. [2]
Vishwanath holds an undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur,completed in 1996. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 2001,after completing a doctoral dissertation,titled "Vortices,quasiparticles and unconventional superconductivity",under the supervision of F. Duncan Haldane. [3] Between 2001 and 2004 he was a Pappalardo fellow at MIT,where his collaborators included T. Senthil and Subir Sachdev. He joined the physics faculty at University of California,Berkeley in 2004 and moved to Harvard University in 2016. [1] He held a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from 2012 to 2015 and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in materials science in 2014. He is one of the recipients of the 2016 EPS Europhysics Prize in condensed matter physics for theoretical studies on magnetic skyrmion phases in MnSi,a new phase of matter. [4] He is one of the recipients of the 2024 Oliver E. Buckley Prize for groundbreaking theoretical and experimental studies on the collective electronic properties of materials that reflect topological aspects of their band structure. [5] He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society. [6]
Vishwanath has made important contributions to several areas in condensed matter physics. In particular,his most important contributions have been in deconfined quantum criticality (with T. Senthil,Matthew P. A. Fisher,Subir Sachdev and Leon Balents),Dirac and Weyl semimetals,iron-based high-temperature superconductors,magnetic skyrmion phases,and topological insulators where,in particular and more recently,he has explored several aspects and field theories of symmetry protected topological phases and Floquet topological phases. He has also done important works on quantum magnetic systems and quantum entanglement properties of spin liquids and related topological orders.
Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter,especially the solid and liquid phases,that arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms and electrons. More generally,the subject deals with condensed phases of matter:systems of many constituents with strong interactions among them. More exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at extremely low cryogenic temperatures,the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms,the Bose–Einstein condensates found in ultracold atomic systems,and liquid crystals. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by experiments to measure various material properties,and by applying the physical laws of quantum mechanics,electromagnetism,statistical mechanics,and other physics theories to develop mathematical models and predict the properties of extremely large groups of atoms.
In mathematics and physics,solitons,topological solitons and topological defects are three closely related ideas,all of which signify structures in a physical system that are stable against perturbations. Solitons won't decay,dissipate,disperse or evaporate in the way that ordinary waves might. The stability arises from an obstruction to the decay,which is explained by having the soliton belong to a different topological homotopy class or cohomology class than the base physical system. More simply:it is not possible to continuously transform the system with a soliton in it,to one without it. The mathematics behind topological stability is both deep and broad,and a vast variety of systems possessing topological stability have been described. This makes categorization somewhat difficult.
The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a physical phenomenon in which the Hall conductance of 2-dimensional (2D) electrons shows precisely quantized plateaus at fractional values of ,where e is the electron charge and h is the Planck constant. It is a property of a collective state in which electrons bind magnetic flux lines to make new quasiparticles,and excitations have a fractional elementary charge and possibly also fractional statistics. The 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Robert Laughlin,Horst Störmer,and Daniel Tsui "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations". The microscopic origin of the FQHE is a major research topic in condensed matter physics.
In physics,a topological quantum number is any quantity,in a physical theory,that takes on only one of a discrete set of values,due to topological considerations. Most commonly,topological quantum numbers are topological invariants associated with topological defects or soliton-type solutions of some set of differential equations modeling a physical system,as the solitons themselves owe their stability to topological considerations. The specific "topological considerations" are usually due to the appearance of the fundamental group or a higher-dimensional homotopy group in the description of the problem,quite often because the boundary,on which the boundary conditions are specified,has a non-trivial homotopy group that is preserved by the differential equations. The topological quantum number of a solution is sometimes called the winding number of the solution,or,more precisely,it is the degree of a continuous mapping.
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014,received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018,and was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 2023. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 2017–2019,and is Editor-in-Chief of Reports on Progress in Physics 2022-.
Piers Coleman is a British-born theoretical physicist,working in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics. Coleman is professor of physics at Rutgers University in New Jersey and at Royal Holloway,University of London.
In condensed matter physics,a quantum spin liquid is a phase of matter that can be formed by interacting quantum spins in certain magnetic materials. Quantum spin liquids (QSL) are generally characterized by their long-range quantum entanglement,fractionalized excitations,and absence of ordinary magnetic order.
In quantum mechanics,fractionalization is the phenomenon whereby the quasiparticles of a system cannot be constructed as combinations of its elementary constituents. One of the earliest and most prominent examples is the fractional quantum Hall effect,where the constituent particles are electrons but the quasiparticles carry fractions of the electron charge. Fractionalization can be understood as deconfinement of quasiparticles that together are viewed as comprising the elementary constituents. In the case of spin–charge separation,for example,the electron can be viewed as a bound state of a 'spinon' and a 'holon ',which under certain conditions can become free to move separately.
Shoucheng Zhang was a Chinese-American physicist who was the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He was a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators,the quantum Hall effect,the quantum spin Hall effect,spintronics,and high-temperature superconductivity. According to the National Academy of Sciences:
He discovered a new state of matter called topological insulator in which electrons can conduct along the edge without dissipation,enabling a new generation of electronic devices with much lower power consumption. For this ground breaking work he received numerous international awards,including the Buckley Prize,the Dirac Medal and Prize,the Europhysics Prize,the Physics Frontiers Prize and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.
Roderich Moessner is a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden,Germany. His research interests are in condensed matter and materials physics,especially concerning new and topological forms of order,as well as the study of classical and quantum many-body dynamics in and out of equilibrium.
The EPS CMD Europhysics Prize is awarded since 1975 by the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society,in recognition of recent work by one or more individuals,for scientific excellence in the area of condensed matter physics. It is one of Europe's most prestigious prizes in the field of condensed matter physics. Several laureates of the EPS CMD Europhysics Prize also received a Nobel Prize in Physics or Chemistry.
Claudia Felser is a German solid state chemist and materials scientist. She is currently a director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. Felser was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for the prediction and discovery of engineered quantum materials ranging from Heusler compounds to topological insulators.
Matthew P. A. Fisher is an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California,Santa Barbara,and is known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics. He completed his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1981 and earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986 with Anthony Leggett as his advisor,with part of his work done under the supervision of Eduardo Fradkin. He went on to become first a visiting scientist and then a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (1986–1993). He joined the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California in 1993. In 2007 he joined Microsoft's Station Q as a research physicist,on leave from the UCSB physics department. During the academic year 2009–2010 he was on the faculty at Caltech,returning to the physics department at UCSB in summer 2010.
Gilbert "Gil" George Lonzarich is a solid-state physicist and Emeritus Professor of the University of Cambridge. He is particularly noted for his work on superconducting and magnetic materials carried out at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Cristiane de Morais Smith Lehner is a Brazilian theoretical physicist and professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht,where she leads a research group studying condensed matter physics,cold atoms and strongly-correlated systems. In 2019,the European Physical Society awarded Morais Smith its Emmy Noether Distinction.
Eugene John "Gene" Mele is a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania,where he researches quantum electric phenomena in condensed matter.
Shivaji Lal Sondhi is an Indian-born theoretical physicist who is currently the Wykeham Professor of Physics in the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford,known for contributions to the field of quantum condensed matter. He is son of former Lok Sabha MP Manohar Lal Sondhi.
Allen Marshall Goldman is an American experimental condensed matter physicist,known for his research on electronic transport properties of superconductors and for the eponymous Carlson-Goldman mode involving collective oscillations in superconductors.
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