Quantum Matter Seminar
M. Zahid Hasan is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2002 and, since that time, has been a major researcher in the field of Topological Quantum Matter. He has written over 280 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the most cited experimenter in the field. His funded research areas include search and discovery of novel phases of matter, emergent new particles, novel quantum effects, exotic superconductivity, quantum magnetism, spin liquids, Weyl magnets and superconductors, chiral materials, topological insulators, Higgs phenomena, kagome magnets and superconductors, anyon superconductivity, fractionalization and Kitaev materials, Ultrafast & Nanoscale quantum phenomena among others. He has led collaborative projects at both Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and held visiting professorships at Caltech and MIT. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2020 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for groundbreaking discoveries in topological insulators, topological magnets and Weyl conductors. He is the recipient of American Competitiveness & Innovation Fellowship “for leadership in the field of physics” by the U.S. National Science Foundation and has been listed in the “World's Most Influential Scientific Minds List” since 2014 onward. He and his students have theoretically predicted and experimentally discovered several novel classes of topological quantum matter over the last two decades. His research works have been featured in Physics Today, Physics World, Scientific American, Nature News, Science News, Discover magazine, New Scientist and similar media including Physics Today's “Search & Discovery” news multiple times over the last two decades. He has delivered many plenary, endowed, named and honorific lectures around the world including the Bose-Einstein centenary lectures in quantum physics. He is an elected fellow to many professional societies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the principal investigator of the Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Advanced Spectroscopy at Princeton University since 2008.
Topology plays a key role in describing quantum matter, which has been greatly explored in recent decades. First, I present how tuning a topological insulator featuring a Dirac fermion can be used as a platform to realize emergent Weyl fermion and "fractional" Fermi surfaces; and can also lead to correlated magnetic, Chern, or many-body states. The kagome lattice, which features Dirac fermions, flat bands, and van Hove singularities, can serve as the platform to explore topology, strong correlation, exotic superconductivity, emergent chirality, and many-body density-wave phenomena as shown in a series of recent works including some new developments. These topological quantum matter harbor novel properties that provide versatile platforms for the development of next-generation quantum devices.