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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.

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CMSA Topological Seminar 09.21.22

Geometric test for topological states of matter

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/MxXD2yA2pxQ Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Semyon Klevtsov, University of Strasbourg Title: Geometric test for topological states of matter Abstract: We generalize the flux insertion argument due to Laughlin, Niu-Thouless-Tao-Wu, and Avron-Seiler-Zograf to the case of fractional quantum Hall states on a higher-genus surface. We propose this setting as a test to characterise the robustness, or […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 09.28.22

Extracting the quantum Hall conductance from a single bulk wavefunction from the modular flow

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/Y6YFgi6X5kE Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Ruihua Fan, Harvard University Title: Extracting the quantum Hall conductance from a single bulk wavefunction from the modular flow Abstract: One question in the study of topological phases is to identify the topological data from the ground state wavefunction without accessing the Hamiltonian. Since local measurement is not enough, […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 10.12.22

Engineering topological phases with a superlattice potential

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/NbjuY80nWgM Topological Quantum Matter Seminar Speaker: Jennifer Cano (Stony Brook and Flatiron Institute) Title: Engineering topological phases with a superlattice potential Abstract: We propose an externally imposed superlattice potential as a platform for manipulating topological phases, which has both advantages and disadvantages compared to a moire superlattice. In the first example, we apply the superlattice […]

Symmetric Mass Generation

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/EYi-eu4ADl0 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 […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 10.26.22

Kähler bands—Chern insulators, holomorphicity and induced quantum geometry

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/2BF5q6d_Zo4 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 […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 11.2.22

Optical axion electrodynamics

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/T1x60gYry4I 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 […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 11.16.22

Vacuum fluctuations in cavities: breakdown of the topological protection in the integer Quantum Hall effect

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/mtheRASO2e0 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 […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 11.23.22

Continuum field theory of graphene bilayer system

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/BIABg2zFVGE 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. […]

CMSA Topological Seminar 12.07.22

Controlling Quantum Matter with Quantum Cavity Fields

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/Ig468DbAVGs 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 . For condensed matter systems it has been demonstrated experimentally that the transport properties of 2D materials […]

Homotopy classes of loops of Clifford unitaries

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

https://youtu.be/vYXTKTmNFHg 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 […]

Phase transitions out of quantum Hall states in moire TMD bilayers

CMSA Room G10 CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

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 […]