Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman, Pappalardo Fellow

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Area of Physics

Condensed Matter Theory

Research Interests

Quantum phases transform electrons into new quasi-particles. They have magnificent and useful properties, from the mobile holes in semiconductors and a superconductor’s Cooper pairs to the fractionalized composite fermions of quantum Hall physics. While conventionally studied in isolation, the discovery of moiré materials — mechanically deformed van der Waals compounds with thousands of atoms per unit cell  — has challenged this paradigm. Experiments have repeatedly shown that these separate pillars of condensed matter can be unified, bridging the gap between phases of matter once thought fundamentally distinct and realizing states with new properties altogether. The intense effort to understand and predict moiré materials has already led to many breakthroughs, and more are sure to come. 

Jonah’s research has centered around flat bands: their classification by space group symmetry, their favored symmetry breaking orders and characteristic collective modes, and the strongly correlated phases they may host in real materials. He has enjoyed the diversity of techniques used in this pursuit, drawing on computational ideas from chemistry, theorems in topology, and exactly solvable models from many fields of physics. He hopes to further our understanding of quantum materials at MIT. 

Biographical Sketch

Jonah grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts with his twin and two moms. He studied physics, applied math, and poetry at Princeton, where he began research on dark matter with Mariangela Lisanti. On a Marshall Scholarship, he read physics during his master’s at Oxford and studied quantum circuits with Austen Lamacraft at Cambridge. He returned to Princeton to work with Andrei Bernevig in condensed matter theory for his PhD, supported by a Hertz Fellowship, and enjoyed a pre-doc at the Flatiron Institute’s Center of Computational Quantum Physics, advised by Nicolas Regnault. He is grateful to many collaborators for teaching and inspiring him.

Selected Publications

• Superfluid weight bounds from symmetry and quantum geometry in flat bands
• Reentrant Correlated Insulators in Twisted Bilayer Graphene at 25 T ( Flux)
• Hofstadter topology with real space invariants and reentrant projective symmetries
• Interacting topological quantum chemistry in 2D with many-body real space invariants
• Moiré fractional Chern insulators. IV. Fluctuation-driven collapse in multiband exact diagonalization calculations on rhombohedral graphene