Brief Curriculum Vitae (PDF version)

Office Address
Department of Physics
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email : lastname@g.harvard.edu
Web : sachdev.physics.harvard.edu
YouTube : youtube.com/@SachdevSYK
Wikipedia : Subir Sachdev

Employment

• Herchel Smith Professor of Physics, Harvard University, July 1, 2015 onwards.
• Chair, Department of Physics, Harvard University, January 1, 2018 to June 30, 2020.
• Professor of Physics, Harvard University, July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2015.
• Miguel Virasoro Visiting International Chair, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, 2024-28.
• Raman Chair, Indian Academy of Sciences, 2023-24.
• Jacques Solvay International Chair in Physics, International Solvay Institutes, Brussels, 2023.
• Visiting Professor, College de France, Paris, May-June 2022.
• Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022.
• Visiting Scholar, Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation, July 2019 onwards.
• Cenovus Energy James Clerk Maxwell Chair in Theoretical Physics (Visiting) at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Feb 1, 2014 to Jan 31, 2019; Feb 1, 2022 to January 31, 2025.
• Stanley S. Hanna Visiting Professor, Stanford University, Fall 2017.
• Dr. Homi Bhabha Chair Professorship, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2019.
• Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Yale University, July 1, 1995 to June 30, 2005.
• Associate Professor (tenured) of Physics and Applied Physics, Yale University, July 1, 1992 to June 30, 1995.
• Associate Professor (term) of Physics and Applied Physics, Yale University, July 1, 1989 to June 30, 1992.
• Assistant Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, Yale University, July 1, 1987 to June 30, 1989.
• Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, September 1, 1985 to August 31, 1987.

Education and Degrees

• High school (upto 10th grade) at St. Joseph's Boys High School, Bangalore, India.
• 11th grade at Kendriya Vidyalaya, ASC Center, Bangalore, India.
• Freshman year at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, 1978-79.
• S. B. (Bachelor of Science) in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 1982 (picture).
• A. M. (Master of Arts) in Physics from Harvard University, June 1984 (picture).
• Ph. D. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University, November 1985. Thesis title: Frustration and Order in Rapidly Cooled Metals (picture).
• M. A. (honorary) from Yale University, 1995.

Honors

• Miguel Virasoro Visiting International Chair, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, 2024-28.
• PROSE (PROfessional and Scholarly Excellence) Award Winner (2024) in the category of chemistry, physics, astronomy and cosmology. Awarded by the Association of American Publishers for Quantum Phases of Matter.
• Raman Chair, Indian Academy of Sciences, 2023-24.
• Foreign Member, The Royal Society, 2023 (picture).
  Citation: Subir Sachdev has made profound contributions to theoretical condensed matter physics research. His main interests have been in quantum magnetism, quantum criticality, and perhaps most innovative of all, links between the nature of quantum entanglement in black holes and strongly interacting electrons in materials.
• Jacques Solvay International Chair in Physics 2023, International Solvay Institutes, Brussels.
  
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019 (picture).
  
• Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru, 2019.
  
• Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, Delhi, 2019 (picture).
  Citation: Professor Subir Sachdev is a world renowned condensed matter theorist, with many seminal contributions to the theory of strongly interacting condensed matter systems. He is a pioneer in the study of systems near quantum phase transitions. He has also pioneered the exploration of the connection between physical properties of modern quantum materials and the nature of quantum entanglement in their many-particle state, elucidating the diverse varieties of entangled states of quantum matter.
• New England Choice Award, Academics, 2018.
• Dirac Medal (picture), International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, 2018; shared with Dam Thanh Son and Xiao-Gang Wen for "independent contributions towards understanding novel phases in strongly interacting many-body systems, introducing original transdisciplinary techniques".
  Citation: Subir Sachdev has made pioneering contributions to many areas of theoretical condensed matter physics. Of particular importance were the development of the theory of quantum critical phenomena in insulators, superconductors and metals; the theory of spin-liquid states of quantum antiferromagnets and the theory of fractionalized phases of matter; the study of novel deconfinement phase transitions; the theory of quantum matter without quasiparticles; and the application of many of these ideas to a priori unrelated problems in black hole physics, including a concrete model of non-Fermi liquids.
• Lars Onsager Prize (picture), American Physical Society, 2018.
  Citation: for his seminal contributions to the theory of quantum phase transitions, quantum magnetism, and fractionalized spin liquids, and for his leadership in the physics community.
• Star Family Prize for Excellence in Advising, Certificate of Distinction, Harvard University, 2016.
• Dirac Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics (picture), the Australian Institute of Physics, the University of New South Wales, and the Royal Society of New South Wales, 2015.
  Citation: The Dirac Medal was awarded to Professor Sachdev in recognition of his many seminal contributions to the theory of strongly interacting condensed matter systems: quantum phase transitions, including the idea of critical deconfinement and the breakdown of the conventional symmetry based Landau-Ginsburg-Wilson paradigm; the prediction of exotic 'spin-liquid' and fractionalized states; and applications to the theory of high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprate materials.
• Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2014 (picture)
  Citation: Sachdev has made seminal advances in the theory of condensed matter systems near a quantum phase transition, which have elucidated the rich variety of static and dynamic behavior in such systems, both at finite temperatures and at T=0. His book, Quantum Phase Transitions, is the basic text of the field.
• Salam Distinguished Lectures 2014, The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy.
• Lifetime Achievement Award (picture), Old Boys' Association, St. Joseph's Boys' High School, Bangalore, September 8, 2013
• Lorentz Chair, Instituut-Lorentz, 2012
• Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 2009-2014.
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, 2003.
• Fellow of the American Physical Society, 2001
  Citation: For his contributions to the theory of quantum phase transitions and its application to correlated electron materials.
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, February 1989.
• Presidential Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation, July 1988 - July 1993 (picture).
• LeRoy Apker Award (picture), given by the American Physical Society, January 1983
  Citation: For his accomplishments as an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including his research "Quantum Electrodynamics in a Damped Cavity"
• Honorable Mention in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical competition, 1980.
• Ranked second (all India) in the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology, 1978.

Introduction to Research

Sachdev's research describes the consequences of quantum entanglement on the macroscopic properties of natural systems. He has made extensive contributions to the description of the diverse varieties of states of quantum matter, and of their behavior near quantum phase transitions. Many of these contributions have been linked to experiments, especially to the rich phase diagrams of the copper-oxide high temperature superconductors. Sachdev's research has also exposed remarkable connections between the nature of multi-particle quantum entanglement in certain laboratory materials, and the quantum entanglement in astrophysical black holes, and these connections have led to new insights on the entropy and radiation of black holes proposed by Stephen Hawking.

Research Highlights

Sachdev has studied the nature of quantum entanglement in two-dimensional antiferromagnets, introducing several key ideas in a series of papers in 1989-1992, and reviewed in his book Quantum Phases of Matter. The first complete emergent gauge theory of quantum antiferromagnets with time-reversal symmetry was introduced. The importance of the analog of 't Hooft/Lieb-Schultz-Mattis anomalies was pointed out, and these anomalies have played a central role in the theory of gapped and gapless quantum spin liquids, including those realized by `deconfined critiality'. By considering Higgs transitions of the emergent U(1) gauge field, the first theory of a gapped fractionalized spin liquid phase with time-reversal symmetry, the Z<sub>2</sub> spin liquid, was presented. This was described by an emergent Z<sub>2</sub> gauge theory, with the same structure of excitations that appeared later in Kitaev's solvable toric code model. This framework also led to the discovery in 2002 of quantum spin liquid states which have metallic Fermi surfaces in `fractionalized Fermi liquids (FL*)'. The FL* Fermi surface does not enclose the Luttinger volume, and this allowed because the 't Hooft/LSM anomaly of a quantum spin liquid can offset the Luttinger count.

Sachdev has developed the theory of quantum criticality, elucidating its implications for experimental observations on materials at non-zero temperature. In this context, he proposed a solvable model of complex quantum entanglement in a metal which does not have any particle-like excitations in 1993: an extension of this is now called the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. These works have led to a theory of quantum phase transitions in metals in the presence of impurity-induced disorder, and a universal theory of strange metals.

Sachdev's theories apply to a wide variety of correlated electron materials, including the copper-oxide materials exhibiting high temperature superconductivity. Many puzzling features of the `pseudogap' phase of these materials are addressed by his works on the interplay between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity, using the theory of critical quantum spin liquids without quasiparticles.

A connection between the structure of quantum entanglement in the SYK model and in black holes was first proposed by Sachdev in 2010, and these connections have led to extensive developments in the quantum theory of black holes.

Books

• Quantum Phase Transitions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1999); paperback in 2001; expanded second edition in 2011.
• Holographic Quantum Matter, with Andrew Lucas and Sean Hartnoll, MIT Press, 2018
• Quantum Phases of Matter, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2023). PROSE (PROfessional and Scholarly Excellence) Award Winner (2024) in the category of chemistry, physics, astronomy and cosmology. Awarded by the Association of American Publishers.

Articles

• 5 selected Papers with Commentaries
• 20 selected Papers with Commentaries
• All papers on arXiv.org
• All papers not on arXiv.org
• Citations and publications on Google Scholar.
• Highly ranked in Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists (F. Radicchi, S. Fortunato, B. Markines, and A. Vespignani, Physical Review E 80, 056103 (2009)).
• Highly Ranked Scholars, in Physics Lifetime, 2024, by ScholarGPS.

Named and plenary lectures

• eQMA Distinguished Lecture, Rice University, February 20, 2025.
• Feenberg Lecture, Washington University in St. Louis, September 25, 2024.
• Raman Chair Public Lecture of the Indian Academy of Sciences, National College, Bengaluru, December 28, 2023.
• Rapporteur at the 29th Solvay Conference on Physics, The Structure and Dynamics of Disordered Systems, Brussels, October 19-21, 2023.
• 2023 Jacques Solvay International Chair in Physics, Inaugural Lecture, Brussels, June 20, 2023.
• Llewellyn G. Hoxton Lecture, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, April 6, 2023.
• Peterson Public Lecture, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, April 26, 2022.
• Arline and Michael Magde Colloquium, Boston College, March 2, 2022.
• Boltzmann Lecture, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Trieste, February 21, 2022.
• The Racah Memorial Lecture, The Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, June 21, 2021.
• H. L. Welsh Lectures in Physics, University of Toronto, May 6,7, 2021.
• New Horizons in Physics-IPA50, Commemorating 50 years of Indian Physics Association, APS-IPA Joint Lecture, February 27, 2021.
• Distinguished Colloquium and Lectureship, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea, February 17-19, 2021.
• Helen and Morton Sternheim Lecture, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, March 10, 2020.
• Marker Lectures, Penn State University, State College, December 4-6, 2019.
• R.E. Bell Lecture, McGill University, Montreal, February 22, 2019.
• Physics Department Memorial Lectureship, University of California, San Diego, February 14, 2019.
• Homi Bhabha Memorial Public Lecture, IISER Pune, November 14, 2017.
• Distinguished lecture, Texas A&M University, November 9, 2017.
• Biard Lecture, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, November 2, 2017.
• 13th Homi Bhabha Public Lecture, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, January 17, 2017.
• Dirac Lecture, University of New South Wales, Australia, September 1, 2015.
• Salam Distinguished Lectures, The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, January 27-30, 2014.
• Institute Lecture, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, January 21, 2014.
• Bethe Colloquium, Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Bonn, January 14, 2013.
• Lorentz Chair, Instituut-Lorentz, May 7, 14, 21, June 4, 2012.
• Arnold Sommerfeld Lectures, University of Munich, January 31 - February 3, 2012.
• HRI-Girdharilal Mehta Lecture, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, January 13, 2012.
• Rapporteur at the 25th Solvay Conference on Physics - The Theory of the Quantum World, Brussels, October 19-22, 2011.
• Plenary talk at the International Conference on Strong Correlated Electron Systems, August 30, 2011.
• Marc Kac Memorial Lectures, Los Alamos National Laboratory, May 3-5, 2011.
• Moshe Flato Lectures, Ben Gurion University, March 10, 2011.
• Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Lectures, International Center for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore, Dec 6-8, 2010
• Plenary talk at the 24th International Conference on Statistical Physics, Cairns, Australia, July 2010.
• Niels Bohr Lecture, Niels Bohr Institute, May 5, 2010
• Colloquium Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Paris, May 3, 2010
• De Sitter Lecture Series in Theoretical Physics 2009, University of Groningen, November 2009
• Solvay colloquium, International Solvay Institutes, Brussels, October 2009
• Rapporteur at the 24th Solvay Conference on Physics, Quantum Theory of Condensed Matter, Brussels, Oct 11-13, 2008.
• Plenary talk at the 25th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics, Amsterdam, August 2008
• Distinguished Lecture Series, Technion, Israel, March 2007.
• Plenary talk at the International Conference on Strongly Correlated Electronic Systems, Karlsruhe, Germany, July 2004
• F. A. Matsen Endowed Regents Lecture on the Structure of Matter at the University of Texas at Austin, October 2002.
• "Colloquium Ehrenfestii", at the Lorentz Institute in Leiden, Holland, May 1998.
• Plenary talk at the 19th International Conference on Statistical Physics, Xiamen, August 1995.

Ph.D. Students and Postdocs