Christopher Laumann

About

Christopher Laumann is an Associate Professor of Physics at Boston University, with research interests centered on quantum many-body theory, computation, and sensing. He is a quantum condensed matter theorist focusing on topics at the intersection of quantum many-body theory, defect sensing, and computation. His work includes studying strongly correlated quantum phases, quantum sensing, topological order, spin glasses, many-body localization, synthetic quantum platforms for simulation and computation, quantum satisfiability, and typical-case complexity. Recently, he has concentrated on the dynamics in quantum spin liquids and in disordered ensembles of solid state defects, utilizing such defects to sense materials in high-pressure environments. Laumann collaborates closely with the Yao Group at Harvard on these topics. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University, a CASM in Mathematics with distinction from Cambridge University, and an M.Sc. in Informatics with distinction from the University of Edinburgh. His honors include the Gutzwiller Fellowship in 2025, an NSF Career Award from 2018 to 2023, and a Sloan Research Fellowship from 2016 to 2018.

Research topics

• Physics
• Mathematics
• Quantum mechanics
• Statistical physics
• Condensed matter physics
• Nanotechnology
• Theoretical physics
• Materials science
• Chemical physics
• Optics

Selected publications

• Imaging the Meissner effect in hydride superconductors using quantum sensors

  Nature · 2024 · 105 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emergent hydrodynamics in a strongly interacting dipolar spin ensemble

  Nature · 2021 · 70 citations

  Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that macroscopic classical phenomena naturally emerge from microscopic quantum laws1–7. However, despite this mantra, building direct connections between these two descriptions has remained an enduring scientific challenge. In particular, it is difficult to quantitatively predict the emergent ‘classical’ properties of a system (for example, diffusivity, viscosity and compressibility) from a generic microscopic quantum Hamiltonian7–14. Here we introduce a hybrid…

  DOI

• Emergent Ergodicity at the Transition between Many-Body Localized Phases

  Physical Review Letters · 2021 · 44 citations

  Strongly disordered systems in the many-body localized (MBL) phase can exhibit ground state order in highly excited eigenstates. The interplay between localization, symmetry, and topology has led to the characterization of a broad landscape of MBL phases ranging from spin glasses and time crystals to symmetry protected topological phases. Understanding the nature of phase transitions between these different forms of eigenstate order remains an essential open question. Here, we conjecture that no…

  DOI

• Efficient Local Classical Shadow Tomography with Number Conservation

  Physical Review Letters · 2024-08-07 · 11 citations

  articleSenior author

  Shadow tomography aims to build a classical description of a quantum state from a sequence of simple random measurements. Physical observables are then reconstructed from the resulting classical shadow. Shadow protocols which use single-body random measurements are simple to implement and capture few-body observables efficiently, but do not apply to systems with fundamental number conservation laws, such as ultracold atoms. We address this shortcoming by proposing and analyzing a new local shado…

  PublisherDOI

• Momentum space entanglement of interacting fermions

  Physical review. B./Physical review. B · 2023-02-17 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Momentum space entanglement entropy probes quantum correlations in interacting fermionic phases. It is very sensitive to interactions, obeying volume-law scaling in general, while vanishing in the Fermi gas. We show that the R\'enyi entropy in momentum space has a systematic expansion in terms of the phase space volume of the partition, which holds at all orders in perturbation theory. This permits, for example, the controlled computation of the entropy of thin shells near the Fermi wave vector…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Quantum Mechanics at the Complexity Frontier

  NSF · $276k · 2016–2018

• Quantum Mechanics at the Complexity Frontier

  NSF · $195k · 2015–2016

• CAREER: Quantum Optimization, Glassiness and Localization

  NSF · $500k · 2018–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Norman Y. Yao

  44 shared

• Antonello Scardicchio

  39 shared

• Anushya Chandran

  Harvard University

  30 shared

• Roderich Moessner

  Max Planck Institute for Physics

  22 shared

• Siddhardh C. Morampudi

  17 shared

• S. L. Sondhi

  University of Oxford

  15 shared

• Michael Knap

  15 shared

• Christopher L. Baldwin

  14 shared

Labs

• PhysicsPI

Education

• Ph.D., Physics

  Princeton University

  2010

• CASM, DAMTP, DPMMS

  University of Cambridge

  2005

• M.Sc., Informatics

  University of Edinburgh

  2004

• AB

  Harvard University

  2003

Awards & honors

• Gutzwiller Fellow 2025
• NSF Career Award 2018-2023
• Sloan Research Fellow 2016-2018

Similar researchers at Boston University

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