Martin Zwierlein

Research Interests

Martin Zwierlein studies strongly interacting Fermi gases of atoms and molecules. These gases host novel states of matter and serve as pristine model systems for other Fermi systems, such as neutron stars or high-temperature superconductors. The group has provided precision measurements of the thermodynamics and transport of Fermi gases across the superfluid transition. Using a Fermi gas microscope with single-atom resolution, the team recently studied spin and charge correlations as well as spin transport in the Fermi-Hubbard model, see https://news.mit.edu/2018/atoms-electrons-high-temperature-superconductors-1206.

By controlling the motion of 400 fermion pairs under the microscope, the group has demonstrated a novel qubit, a quantum analogue of two coupled pendula, featuring coherence times on the scale of ten seconds, https://physics.mit.edu/news/vibrating-atoms-make-robust-qubits-physicists-find/.

A current focus is on spin, heat and Hall transport properties of strongly interacting Bose and Fermi gases, which have great importance for our understanding of modern materials. One highlight of this work is the measurement of sound propagation in strongly interacting Fermi gases, demonstrating “perfect fluidity’’ in a system that is analogous to dilute neutron matter, https://news.mit.edu/2020/sound-perfect-fluid-1203.

Recent work on rotating quantum gases mimics the behavior of electrons in high magnetic fields, as they enter the quantum Hall regime. A quantum analogue of weather pattern formation shows that quantum Hall states are unstable against interactions, https://physics.mit.edu/news/physicists-watch-as-ultracold-atoms-form-a-crystal-of-quantum-tornadoes/.

Lab/Group: Ultracold Quantum Gases

Biographical Sketch

Martin Zwierlein is the Thomas A. Frank Professor of Physics at MIT and Principal Investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the NSF Center for Ultracold Atoms. Zwierlein studied physics at the University of Bonn and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and received his PhD in experimental atomic physics from MIT in 2007, with a thesis supervised by Wolfgang Ketterle on the observation of superfluidity in atomic Fermi gases. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Mainz in the group of Immanuel Bloch, he joined the MIT physics department in 2007, where he received tenure in 2012 and promotion to Full Professor in 2013.

Zwierlein’s awards include the Klung-Wilhelmy-Weberbank Prize (2007), Young Investigator Awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research and DARPA (2010), a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (2010), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2010), the I.I. Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (APS) (2017), the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2019), and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2019). He is a Fellow of the APS (2016).