Ashvin Vishwanath

Ashvin Vishwanath is a Professor at the Physics Department of University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Guggenheim Fellowship in Materials science.[1]

Education and employment

Vishwanath holds an undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, completed in 1996. His doctoral work was done at Princeton University under the supervision of Duncan Haldane.[2] He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2001 for a thesis on "Vortices, Quasiparticles and Unconventional Superconductivity".[3] Between 2001-2004 he was a Pappalardo fellow at MIT where his collaborators included Todadri Senthil and Subir Sachdev.

Research

Vishwanath is a founder of the field of deconfined quantum phase transitions. In a series of papers,[4][5][6] Vishwanath and collaborators studied a quantum magnet model of spin-1/2 particles populating a two-dimensional square lattice. They showed that the system exhibits a "Landau forbidden" quantum phase transition between a Neel antiferromagnet and a valence bond solid. Further, they suggested that deconfined criticality such they found is a generic possibility for quantum phase transitions. Vishwanath's work was the inspiration for a major research effort in this area which (as of 2015) is ongoing.

Vishwanath also has invented the concept of a Weyl metal.[7] This is the idea that topologically protected surface modes might exist in systems that are gapless in the bulk, contrary to the usual intuition about topological insulator materials.[8] There is a major experimental and theoretical research effort aimed at realising and understanding such systems [9][10][11]

References

  1. ↑ "Materials Scientist Ashvin Vishwanath Wins Guggenheim Fellowship". Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. University of California. April 22, 2014. Retrieved 10 March 2015.
  2. ↑ "Two-Dimensional Anisotropic Non-Fermi-Liquid Phase of Coupled Luttinger Liquids". Physical Review Letters. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  3. ↑ "Vortices, quasiparticles and unconventional superconductivity". Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2001. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  4. ↑ "Deconfined Quantum Critical Points". Science. Retrieved 9 March 2015.
  5. ↑ "Quantum criticality and deconfinement in phase transitions between valence bond solids". Physical Review B. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  6. ↑ "Quantum criticality beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm". Physical Review B. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  7. ↑ "Topological semimetal and Fermi-arc surface states in the electronic structure of pyrochlore iridates". Physical Review B. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  8. ↑ "Weyl electrons kiss: a Viewpoint by Leon Balents". Physics Today. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  9. ↑ "Weyl Semimetal Phase in Noncentrosymmetric Transition-Metal Monophosphides". Physical Review B. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  10. ↑ "Dirac versus Weyl Fermions in Topological Insulators: Adler-Bell-Jackiw Anomaly in Transport Phenomena". Physical Review B. Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  11. ↑ "Quantum oscillations from surface Fermi arcs in Weyl and Dirac semimetals". Nature. Retrieved 20 May 2015.

External links

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