I am a postdoc with Professor Nandini Trivedi at the Department of Physics, The Ohio State University. My research focuses on the theory of strongly correlated electron systems. This is a branch of condensed matter physics that seeks to understand how the mutual interaction of a large number of electrons in a solid leads to interesting collective behavior. I have worked on a diverse range of topics which are all interconnected through the themes of magnetism, superconductivity, disorder, quantum criticality, and the Coulomb blockade.
Recently I have also become interested in the field of cold atoms. Various experimental groups have succeeded in cooling dilute ultracold gases of bosons and fermions down to the degeneracy temperature, at which quantum effects become important. These systems have demonstrated great potential for quantum simulation and quantum computing. Because they are clean and tunable, they may reveal physics which is obscured in condensed matter systems. For example, we predict that Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) states should occur in the attractive Hubbard model with unequal fermion populations, which can be simulated using cold fermions in optical lattices near a Feshbach resonance.
The figures below show the phase diagrams of the cubic lattice attractive Hubbard model at |U|/t=6. It was originally thought that there is a first-order phase transition from a BCS superfluid to a polarized Fermi liquid as a function of increasing field. Our fully self-consistent Bogoliubov-de Gennes results find a large Larkin-Ovchinnikov (LO) region. For fixed numbers of fermions, the LO state can be viewed as microscale phase separation between paired and polarized regions, as opposed to macroscopic phase separation (PS).
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Grand canonical ensemble: Chemical potential mu vs Zeeman field h |
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Canonical ensemble: Number density from 1/2 filling, n vs imbalance, m |
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