Join us again for these exciting upcoming seminars in AY26/27. More details of each seminar below.
NOTE: Participants are kindly requested to register for each talk individually via the respective seminar's event links provided below.
Completed Seminars (AY26/27):
11 Aug 2026 (Monday) - Liang Wu (University of Pennsylvania) Read the Article Here
Upcoming Seminars (AY 26/27):
5 Oct 2026 (Monday) - Leo Jia Li (University of Texas at Austin)
2 Nov 2026 (Monday) - Tomas Jungwirth (Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
16 Nov 2026 (Monday) - Prof Youichi Yanase (Kyoto University)
14 Dec 2026 (Monday) - Sven Hofling (University of Würzburg)
25 Jan 2027 (Monday) - Maksym Serbyn (Institute of Science and Technology, Austria)
Feb 2027 (Monday) - To be announced.
March 2026 (Monday) - To be announced.
Note: Seminar schedule may be subjected to changes.
These seminars are part of the IAS Frontiers Seminars: Quantum Horizons series, jointly organised and supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS).
UPCOMING SEMINARS
About the seminar:
Route to Experimental Demonstrations of Altermagnetism
The replacement of Flash memories by spintronic memories on advanced-node microprocessors has made ferromagnets vital complements of semiconductors in the present chip industry. The basic physical principle underpinning spintronic functionalities is time-reversal symmetry breaking. In ferromagnets, this takes the form of lifted Kramers degeneracy of the Fermi surface into majority- and minority-spin electronic states, giving rise to internal magnetization. Since magnetization limits scalability due to stray fields and hinders an energetically inexpensive transition from GHz to THz operation speeds, research has emerged towards spintronics without magnetization. We first recall how this route was opened by realizing that spin degeneracy does not necessarily exclude time-reversal symmetry breaking in the Fermi surfaces of some collinear antiferromagnets. Besides enabling spintronic memories with no stray fields and picosecond switching times, these antiferromagnets have entered quantum technologies by enabling a field-free and magnetization-free superconducting diode. However, the absence of spin splitting remains a major roadblock, circumvented only through subtle and complex means of operating these devices. In the second part, we remove this roadblock by presenting experimental demonstrations of altermagnetism and spintronic devices based on this recently identified form of collinear magnetic order. Spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy directly shows that the electronic band structure of altermagnets breaks time-reversal symmetry by spin-splitting electronic states despite vanishing magnetization. This enables magnetization-free altermagnetic devices to be operated by means analogous to ferromagnetic spintronics, as demonstrated in altermagnetic anomalous-Hall and spin-injection devices.
About the speaker:
Tomas Jungwirth is a Head of the Department of Spintronics and Nanoelectronics at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, a Chair Professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK, and a Distinguished Professor at the Tohoku University in Japan. He is a recurrent Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher. He contribited to the discovery of the spin Hall effect, a phenomenon currently adopted by major semiconductor companies developing the next generation of magnetic random access memories. With collaborators, he initiated the field of antiferromagnetic spintronics by demonstrating proof-of-concept stray-field-free THz-speed spintronic memories. For the recent discovery of altermagnetism, Tomas Jungwirth was awarded, together with Libor Smejkal and Jairo Sinova, the 2026 Europhysics Prize by the European Physical Society.
About the seminar:
Quantum Geometric Principles for Magnetism and Superconductivity
While the dispersion relation in band structures has long been regarded as a fundamental property of electrons in solids, the geometric structure of Bloch wave functions, encoded in the quantum geometric tensor, has recently emerged as a key ingredient of quantum materials.
We present a unified perspective linking quantum geometry and many-body instabilities in interacting electron systems. We demonstrate that the quantum metric directly controls electronic instabilities, giving rise to ferromagnetism, odd-parity multipole order, and spin-triplet superconductivity. We further reveal its crucial role in the optical responses of superconductors and derive anomalous scaling laws for the superfluid weight of geometric origin.
These results establish a general framework in which quantum geometry serves as a predictive principle for emergent orders and provides a means of identifying exotic superconductors such as twisted multilayer graphene.
About the speaker:
Youichi Yanase received his PhD in Science from Kyoto University in 2001 and spent nine years as an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo. After five and a half years at Niigata University, he returned to Kyoto University in 2015. Since 2020, he has been a professor in the Condensed Matter Theory Group at Kyoto University. His group’s research interests include superconductivity and magnetism with exotic symmetry and topology, nonreciprocal responses in quantum materials, and quantum geometry in condensed matter physics.
[14 Dec 2026 by Prof Sven Hofling, University of Würzburg, Germany]
Talk details to be announced soon.
[25 Jan 2027 by Prof Maksym Serbyn, University of Science and Technology, Austria]
About the seminar:
Landscapes of Quantum Thermalisation and Non-Ergodic Dynamics
In this seminar, I will focus on out-of-equilibrium many-body quantum systems. In contrast to low-energy states, described through the notion of phases of matter, our understanding of out-of-equilibrium properties is in its infancy. A natural coarse classification comes from the approach to thermal equilibrium: generic systems thermalize in accordance with the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis, erasing local memory of their initial state. Yet striking exceptions exist. I will survey the landscape of quantum thermalisation and the mechanisms of its failure. Many-body localisation provides the paradigmatic strong ergodicity breaking, where disorder entirely arrests thermalisation and preserves local memory. Quantum many-body scars offer a weaker violation, in which rare non-thermal eigenstates coexist with an otherwise thermalizing spectrum. I will also discuss how slow non-ergodic dynamics emerges near first-order quantum phase transitions. Beyond classification, these failures of thermalisation enable genuinely new out-of-equilibrium phenomena, including discrete time crystals and coherent dynamical order. These phases have no equilibrium analog and are directly accessible in current quantum simulators. I will conclude by outlining a broader perspective, in which non-ergodic points serve as organising centers that structure the landscape of thermalisation and its timescales.
About the speaker:
Maksym Serbyn received his PhD from MIT in 2014. After a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley, he joined the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in 2017 as an assistant professor and was promoted to professor in 2022. Maksym is best known for his work on non-equilibrium quantum systems, including many-body localisation and quantum many-body scars.