Theory Colloquium: Lighting up superconductivity

Video

Short Biography: 

Eugene Demler is an outstanding theoretical physicist working on a wide range of topics in the field of strongly correlated quantum systems. These include high-temperature superconductors, antiferromagnets, quantum Hall systems, Bose-Einstein condensates, topological insulators and time crystals. His pioneering work shaped the new field of quantum simulators, using ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices to simulate solid-state systems. He also employed these new methods to analyse quantum many-body systems out of equilibrium. Moreover, his research led to new methods to optically control the properties of complex materials (e.g. amplification of superconductivity) and to novel photonic nanodevices (e.g. optical transistors that can be controlled by a single photon).

Eugene Demler studied theoretical physics from 1988 to 1993 in Moscow at the Institute of Physics and Technology and the Lebedev Physics Institute. He then moved to Stanford University, where he received his PhD in 1998 under the supervision of S. C. Zhang. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara in 1998/99. Afterwards he became a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, advanced to an assistant professor at Harvard in 2001 and was awarded a full professorship there in 2005. Eugene Demler was a member of the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms and the Institute for Theoretical Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Since 2021, he is Professor at ETH Zurich.

For his many contributions, Eugene Demler received several prizes and awards. In 2002, he was a Sloan Research Fellow and received an NSF Career Award. In 2006 he was given the Johannes Gutenberg Lecture Award in Mainz and in 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2014 he received the Siemens Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation and in 2021 the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. In 2014 he was selected as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and in 2017 - 2020 as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics. He was a Distinguished Scholar at the Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching in 2015, a Hanna Visiting Scholar at Stanford in 2019 and a Moore Distinguished Scholar at Caltech in 2020. He became a Simons Fellow in 2015 and a Simons Investigator in 2021.