2018-2023 Graduate Student Fellow
Previous Faculty Advisor: Professor Joel Moore
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT
Aleksandr is a theoretical physicist who studied the transport properties of quantum materials, particularly the role of topology within them. While quantum mechanics is typically confined to the microscopic world, in quantum materials, it manifests on a macroscopic scale. This unique feature poses challenges, but it also holds promise as these materials can exhibit properties not observed in conventional matter.
Two of Aleksandr’s projects explored the manifestations of band structure topology in transport effects. The first one investigated nonlinear optical responses in 3D Weyl semimetals, which were found to be quantized similarly to the quantum Hall effect in 2D materials. The second project focused on a novel type of hydrodynamic behavior in clean electron systems, driven by Berry curvature, and drastically different from conventional fluid behavior.
Additionally, he worked on a project aimed at understanding quantum chaos and thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems through the time evolution of local operators.