Xiao-Gang Wen received a BS in physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 1982 and a PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1987.

Wen’s main research area is condensed matter theory. He introduced the notion of topological order and quantum order to describe a new class of matter states. This opens up a new research direction in condensed matter physics. He found that states with topological order contain nontrivial edge excitations and developed chiral Luttinger theory for the edge states. The edge states can become ideal conduction channel, which may leads to device application of topological phases. He also proposed a special class of topological order: non-Abelian quantum Hall states. They contain emergent particles with non-Abelian statistics which generalizes the well-known Bose and Fermi statistics. Non-Abelian particles may allow us to perform fault tolerant quantum computations. He found that string-net condensations can give rise to a large class of topological orders. In particular, string-net condensation provides a unified origin of photons, electrons, and other elementary particles. It unifies two fundamental phenomena: gauge interactions and Fermi statistics. He also proposed the SU(2) gauge theory of high Tc superconductors.

Wen is a Cecil and Ida Green professor of Physics at MIT, a Distinguished Moore Scholar at Caltech and a Distinguished Research Chair at Perimeter Institute.

Martin Zwierlein joined the Department of Physics as an assistant professor in fall 2007. He studied physics at the University of Bonn and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he received his undergraduate and master’s degree in theoretical physics in 2002. His doctoral thesis, completed in 2006, was in experimental atomic physics in the group of Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT.

His research focused on the observation of superfluidity in ultracold fermionic gases, a novel form of strongly interacting matter. From 2006-07, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Mainz in the group of Immanuel Bloch. At MIT, Zwierlein’s group studies mixtures of quantum gases as novel forms of strongly interacting matter, to find atomic analogs for high-tc superconductors and colossal magnetoresistance materials.