Prize Recipient

Ashvin Vishwanath
Harvard University

"For groundbreaking theoretical and experimental studies on the collective electronic properties of materials that reflect topological aspects of their band structure."

Ashvin Vishwanath is the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He grew up in Bangalore, India, earned his undergraduate degree from IIT-Kanpur in Physics in 1996 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2001 under Duncan Haldane. Following a Pappalardo Fellowship at MIT, he served on the faculty at U.C. Berkeley from 2004-2016, before moving to Harvard University. Vishwanath’s research with various collaborators includes pioneering studies of topological semimetals, notably Weyl semimetals and the prediction of their unique surface states which have been confirmed in numerous experiments. His work identified novel metallic dislocations and the concepts of filling constraints, symmetry indicators and fragile topology in crystals which facilitated topological materials discovery. Going beyond the single particle paradigm, he played a key part in identifying Integer quantum Hall states of bosons and the role of hedgehog defects in non-Landau transitions and Dirac spin liquids. His research on surface topological order led to a novel variant of the Pfaffian state. He now works on superconductivity and fractionalization in the topological bands of moire' materials and on entangled quantum states far from equilibrium including spin liquids and non-Abelian states in quantum devices. He received the Europhysics Prize (2016) and the Sloan (2004) and the Guggenheim (2014) Fellowships. He’s an APS Fellow and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).