Anushya Chandran

About

Anushya Chandran is an Associate Professor of Physics at Boston University. She is a condensed matter theorist with broad research interests in quantum many-body systems in and out-of-equilibrium, including driven quantum matter, thermalization, localization, topological systems, quantum entanglement, and the physics of near-term quantum devices. Her group develops organizing principles at the non-equilibrium frontier, applies them to understand experiments in current quantum hardware, and uses these principles to design novel near-term quantum devices and state preparation protocols. Additionally, her research has a long-standing focus on quantum entanglement, exploring its uses and misuses in characterizing quantum matter and its importance as a quantum resource. Dr. Chandran obtained her B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras in 2008 and completed her PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 2013. Following a postdoctoral position at the Perimeter Institute, she joined Boston University, where she currently serves as an Associate Professor. She is a recipient of the Gutzwiller Fellowship, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Research topics

• Quantum mechanics
• Physics
• Statistical physics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Theoretical physics
• Condensed matter physics
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Combinatorics
• Classical mechanics

Selected publications

• Quantum Many-Body Scars: A Quasiparticle Perspective

  Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics · 2022 · 223 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Weakly interacting quasiparticles play a central role in the low-energy description of many phases of quantum matter. At higher energies, however, quasiparticles cease to be well defined in generic many-body systems owing to a proliferation of decay channels. In this review, we discuss the phenomenon of quantum many-body scars, which can give rise to certain species of stable quasiparticles throughout the energy spectrum. This goes along with a set of unusual nonequilibrium phenomena including m…

  DOI

• A constructive theory of the numerically accessible many-body localized to thermal crossover

  SciPost Physics · 2022 · 95 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The many-body localised (MBL) to thermal crossover observed in exact diagonalisation studies remains poorly understood as the accessible system sizes are too small to be in an asymptotic scaling regime. We develop a model of the crossover in short 1D chains in which the MBL phase is destabilised by the formation of many-body resonances. The model reproduces several properties of the numerically observed crossover, including an apparent correlation length exponent \nu=1 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http:…

  DOI

• Phenomenology of the Prethermal Many-Body Localized Regime

  Physical Review Letters · 2023 · 56 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The dynamical phase diagram of interacting disordered systems has seen substantial revision over the past few years. Theory must now account for a large prethermal many-body localized regime in which thermalization is extremely slow, but not completely arrested. We derive a quantitative description of these dynamics in short-ranged one-dimensional systems using a model of successive many-body resonances. The model explains the decay timescale of mean autocorrelators, the functional form of the d…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Nonadiabatic Topological Energy Pumps with Quasiperiodic Driving

  Physical Review Letters · 2021 · 44 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We derive a topological classification of the steady states of d-dimensional lattice models driven by D incommensurate tones. Mapping to a unifying (d+D)-dimensional localized model in frequency space reveals anomalous localized topological phases (ALTPs) with no static analog. While the formal classification is determined by d+D, the observable signatures of each ALTP depend on the spatial dimension d. For each d, with d+D=3, we identify a quantized circulating current and corresponding topolog…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Many-body localization with quasiperiodic driving

  Physical review. B./Physical review. B · 2022 · 29 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Sufficient disorder is believed to localize static and periodically driven interacting chains. With quasiperiodic driving by $D$ incommensurate tones, the fate of this many-body localization (MBL) is unknown. We argue that randomly disordered MBL exists for $D=2$, but not for $D\ensuremath{\ge}3$. Specifically, a putative two-tone driven MBL chain is neither destabilized by thermal avalanches seeded by rare thermal regions, nor by the proliferation of long-range many-body resonances. For $D\ensu…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Topology and symmetry in non-equilibrium quantum systems

  NSF · $575k · 2018–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Philip J. D. Crowley

  Harvard University

  32 shared

• Chris R. Laumann

  Boston University

  30 shared

• Joshua Combes

  27 shared

• Howard M. Wiseman

  Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology

  18 shared

• Alexandr Sergeevich

  ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems

  18 shared

• Stephen D. Bartlett

  18 shared

• David M. Long

  University of Maryland, College Park

  16 shared

• S. L. Sondhi

  University of Oxford

  14 shared

Awards & honors

• Gutzwiller Fellowship
• Sloan Research Fellowship
• Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundat…

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Ed Kearnsh-122
• Robert Careyh-110
• Lawrence R. Sulakh-107