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:
Charge Density Wave Orders in Rhombohedral Graphene
Charge density waves (CDWs), electronic states characterised by spontaneously broken translational symmetry, are a common instability in strongly interacting electron systems. They are ubiquitous across condensed matter physics, playing important roles in both quantum Hall systems and unconventional superconductors. In this talk, I will explore CDW orders in rhombohedral multilayer graphene using transport techniques. I show that CDW order in this material is intimately intertwined with the emergence of both superconductivity and the fractional quantum Hall effect. I will discuss the origin of this intertwinement and its implications for understanding Cooper pairing, charge fractionalisation, and the broader emergence of correlated phases at the intersection of strong correlations, topology, and broken symmetries.
About the speaker:
Leo Jia Li is a condensed matter experimentalist specialising in low-temperature electronic systems in low-dimensional materials. He received his PhD in Physics from Northwestern University and conducted postdoctoral research at Columbia University. Leo arrived at UT Austin from Brown University, where he was an associate professor of physics.
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.