Xiao-Gang Wen
Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics
areas of expertise: theory of strongly correlated electronic systems, theory of topological order and quantum order, theory of cuprate superconductors, origin and unification elementary particles (such as light and electrons), theory of quantum hall effect and non-abelian statistics, theoretical condensed matter physics, physics
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.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu