During the Fall 2023 semester, the CMSA will host a seminar on Topological Quantum Matter organized by Jie Wang. (The seminar will not run in Spring 2024). This seminar takes place on Wednesdays from 10:30–11:30 am (Eastern time). The meetings are held in Room G10 at the CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02138, and some meetings will take place virtually on Zoom or be held in hybrid formats. To learn how to attend, please fill out this form.

CMSA COVID-19 Policies



  • December 06, 2023 10:30 AM
Speaker: Yunqin Zheng
Title: Gapless SPT States from Kennedy Tasaki Transformation
Venue: virtual

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Yunqin Zheng, Stony Brook University Title: Gapless SPT States from Kennedy Tasaki Transformation

  • December 04, 2023 02:00 PM
Speaker: Ken K. W. Ma
Title:
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker:  Ken K. W. Ma (Northeastern University)

  • November 29, 2023 10:30 AM
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Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar  

  • November 22, 2023 10:30 AM
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Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar  

  • November 15, 2023 10:30 AM
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Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar  

  • November 08, 2023 10:30 AM
Speaker: Bruno Mera
Title: Uniqueness of Landau levels and their analogs with higher Chern numbers
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Bruno Mera, Instituto Superior Tecnico Title: Uniqueness of Landau levels and their analogs with higher Chern numbers Abstract: Lowest Landau level wavefunctions are eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of a charged par- ticle in two dimensions under a uniform magnetic field. They are known to be holomorphic both in real and momentum spaces, and also exhibit uniform, translationally invariant, geometrical properties in momentum space. In this talk, using the Stone-von Neumann the- orem, we show that lowest Landau level wavefunctions are indeed the only possible states with unit Chern number satisfying these conditions. We also prove the uniqueness of their direct analogs with higher Chern numbers and provide their expressions. Ref: Bruno Mera and Tomoki Ozawa. Uniqueness of Landau levels…

  • November 01, 2023 10:30 AM
Speaker: Shenghan Jiang
Title: Unveiling Correlated Topological Insulators through Fermionic Tensor Network States
Venue: virtual

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Shenghan Jiang, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences UCAS Title: Unveiling Correlated Topological Insulators through Fermionic Tensor Network States Abstract: The study of topological band insulators has revealed fascinating phases characterized by band topology indices, harboring extraordinary boundary modes protected by anomalous symmetry actions. In strongly correlated systems, it has been established that topological insulator phases persist as stable phases. However, due to the inability to express the ground states of such systems as Slater determinants, the formulation of generic variational wavefunctions for numerical simulations is highly desirable. In this talk, we tackle this challenge by developing a comprehensive framework with fermionic tensor network states. Starting from simple assumptions, we write down tensor equations,…

  • October 25, 2023 10:30 AM
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Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar  

  • October 18, 2023 10:30 AM
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Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar  

  • October 16, 2023 02:00 PM
Speaker: Ceren Dag
Title: Breaking ergodicity: quantum scars and regular eigenstates
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Ceren Dag, Harvard Title: Breaking ergodicity: quantum scars and regular eigenstates Abstract: Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) consist of a few low-entropy eigenstates in an otherwise chaotic many-body spectrum and can weakly break ergodicity resulting in robust oscillatory dynamics. The notion of QMBS follows the original single-particle scars introduced within the context of quantum billiards, where scarring manifests in the form of a quantum eigenstate concentrating around an underlying classical unstable periodic orbit (UPO). A direct connection between these notions remains an outstanding problem. Here, we study a many-body spinor condensate that, owing to its collective interactions, is amenable to the diagnostics of scars. We characterize the system’s rich dynamics, spectrum, and phase space, consisting of both…

  • October 10, 2023 04:00 PM
Speaker: Daniele Guerci
Title: Chern Mosaic and ideal bands in helical trilayer graphene
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Daniele Guerci, Flatiron Institute Title: Chern Mosaic and ideal bands in helical trilayer graphene Abstract: In this talk I will present helical trilayer graphene (hTTG) which is characterized an emergent real-space Chern mosaic pattern resulting from the interface of two incommensurate moiré lattices [1]. This pattern shows distinct regions with finite integer Chern numbers separated by domain walls where the spectrum is gapless and connected at all energy scales [2]. After introducing the Hamiltonian describing hTTG I will focus my attention on the macroscopic domains, that host isolated flat bands with intriguing properties. Upon investigating the chiral limit, where analytical expressions can be derived, we found that the flat bands features the superposition…

  • September 20, 2023 10:30 AM
Speaker: Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman
Title: Exact Results in Flat Band Hubbard Models
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman, Princeton University Title: Exact Results in Flat Band Hubbard Models Abstract: Flat bands, like those in the kagome lattice or twisted bilayer graphene, are a natural setting for studying strongly coupled physics since the interaction strength is the only energy scale in the problem. They can exhibit unconventional behavior in the multi-orbital case: the mean-field theory of flat band attractive Hubbard models shows the possibility of superconductivity even though the Fermi velocity of the bands is strictly zero. However, it is not necessary to resort to this approximation. We demonstrate that the groundstates and low-energy excitations of a large class of attractive Hubbard models are exactly solvable, offering a rare, microscopic view of their physics. The solution…

  • September 13, 2023 10:30 AM
Speaker: Xueyang Song
Title: Phase transitions out of quantum Hall states in moire TMD bilayers
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Xueyang Song (MIT) Title: Phase transitions out of quantum Hall states in moire TMD bilayers Abstract: Motivated by the recent experimental breakthroughs in observing Fractional Quantum Anomalous Hall (FQAH) states in moir\’e Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (TMD) bilayers, we propose and study various unconventional phase transitions between quantum Hall phases and Fermi liquids or charge ordered phases upon tuning the bandwidth.  At filling -2/3, we describe a direct transition between the FQAH state and a Charge Density Wave (CDW) insulator. The critical theory resembles that of the familiar deconfined quantum critical point (DQCP) but with an additional Chern-Simons term. At filling -1/2, we study the possibility of a continuous transition between the composite Fermi…

  • September 12, 2023 04:00 PM
Speaker: Roman Geiko
Title: Homotopy classes of loops of Clifford unitaries
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Roman Geiko, UCLA Title: Homotopy classes of loops of Clifford unitaries Abstract: We study Clifford locality-preserving unitaries and stabilizer Hamiltonians by means of Hermitian K-theory. We demonstrate how the notion of algebraic homotopy of modules over Laurent polynomial rings translates into the connectedness of two short-range entangled stabilizer Hamiltonians by a shallow Clifford circuit. We apply this observation to a classification of homotopy classes of loops of Clifford unitaries. The talk is based on a work in collaboration with Yichen Hu.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09903.

  • December 07, 2022 10:00 AM
Speaker: Vasil Rokaj
Title: Controlling Quantum Matter with Quantum Cavity Fields
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Vasil Rokaj (Harvard) Title: Controlling Quantum Matter with Quantum Cavity Fields Abstract: Cavity modification of material properties and phenomena is a novel research field motivated by the advances in strong light-matter interactions [1]. For condensed matter systems it has been demonstrated experimentally that the transport properties of 2D materials can be modified via coupling to vacuum fields [2,3]. While in polaritonic chemistry it has been shown that ground state chemical properties can be controlled with cavity fields [4]. In the first part of my talk, I will present how the quantized cavity field can alter the conduction properties of a condensed matter system by focusing on the paradigmatic Sommerfeld model of the free…

  • November 23, 2022 09:00 AM
Speaker: Jian Kang
Title: Continuum field theory of graphene bilayer system
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Jian Kang, School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China Title: Continuum field theory of graphene bilayer system Abstract: The Bistritzer-MacDonald (BM) model predicted the existence of the narrow bands in the magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG), and nowadays is a starting point for most theoretical works. In this talk, I will briefly review the BM model and then present a continuum field theory [1] for graphene bilayer system allowing any smooth lattice deformation including the small twist angle. With the gradient expansion to the second order, the continuum theory for MATBG [2] produces the spectrum that almost perfectly matches the spectrum of the microscopic model, suggesting the validity of…

  • November 16, 2022 10:00 AM
Speaker: Jérôme Faist
Title: Vacuum fluctuations in cavities: breakdown of the topological protection in the integer Quantum Hall effect
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Jérôme Faist  (ETH Zurich) Title: Vacuum fluctuations in cavities: breakdown of the topological protection in the integer Quantum Hall effect Abstract: When a collection of electronic excitations are strongly coupled to a single mode cavity, mixed light-matter excitations called polaritons are created. The situation is especially interesting when the strength of the light-matter coupling ΩR is such that the coupling energy becomes close to the one of the bare matter resonance ω0. For this value of parameters, the system enters the so-called ultra-strong coupling regime, in which a number of very interesting physical effects were predicted caused by the counter-rotating and diamagnetic terms of the Hamiltonian. In a microcavity, the strength of…

  • November 02, 2022 09:00 AM
Speaker: Junyeong Ahn
Title: Optical axion electrodynamics
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Junyeong Ahn (Harvard) Title: Optical axion electrodynamics Abstract: Electromagnetic fields in a magneto-electric medium behave in close analogy to photons coupled to the hypothetical elementary particle, the axion. This emergent axion electrodynamics is expected to provide novel ways to detect and control material properties with electromagnetic fields. Despite having been studied intensively for over a decade, its theoretical understanding remains mostly confined to the static limit. Formulating axion electrodynamics at general optical frequencies requires resolving the difficulty of calculating optical magneto-electric coupling in periodic systems and demands a proper generalization of the axion field. In this talk, I will introduce a theory of optical axion electrodynamics that allows for a simple quantitative…

  • October 26, 2022 09:00 AM
Speaker: Bruno Mera
Title: Kähler bands—Chern insulators, holomorphicity and induced quantum geometry
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Bruno Mera, Tohoku University Title: Kähler bands—Chern insulators, holomorphicity and induced quantum geometry Abstract: The notion of topological phases has dramatically changed our understanding of insulators. There is much to learn about a band insulator beyond the assertion that it has a gap separating the valence bands from the conduction bands. In the particular case of two dimensions, the occupied bands may have a nontrivial topological twist determining what is called a Chern insulator. This topological twist is not just a mathematical observation, it has observable consequences—the transverse Hall conductivity is quantized and proportional to the 1st Chern number of the vector bundle of occupied states over the Brillouin zone. Finer properties of…

  • October 19, 2022 04:00 PM
Speaker: Yizhuang You
Title: Symmetric Mass Generation
Venue: CMSA Room G10

Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Yizhuang You, UC San Diego Title: Symmetric Mass Generation Abstract: Symmetric mass generation (SMG) is a novel mechanism for massless fermions to acquire a mass via a strong-coupling non-perturbative interaction effect. In contrast to the conventional Higgs mechanism for fermion mass generation, the SMG mechanism does not condense any fermion bilinear coupling and preserves the full symmetry. It is connected to a broad range of topics, including anomaly cancellation, topological phase classification, and chiral fermion regularization. In this talk, I will introduce SMG through toy models, and review the current understanding of the SMG transition. I will also mention recent numerical efforts to investigate the SMG phenomenon. I will conclude the talk…