Leyna Shackleton, Pappalardo Fellow

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Area of Physics

Condensed Matter Theory

Research Interests

Leyna’s research goals are to characterize and predict novel quantum phenomena that can emerge in materials when strong interactions between electrons yield phases of matter with high amounts of quantum entanglement. This entanglement can result in remarkable features, such as fractionalization – where exotic particle-like excitations emerge which cannot be simply constructed from individual electrons – or phases of matter which lack a description in terms of sharply defined quasiparticles. As a graduate student, Leyna studied universal properties of phase transitions between quantum phases of matter, developed new computational methods for analyzing many-body systems, and worked to derive experimental signatures for detecting strongly-interacting phases. Going forward, she is excited to continue pursuing these research directions while exploring the plethora of emerging experimental platforms for realizing macroscopic quantum phenomena.

Biographical Sketch

Leyna grew up in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. She attended MIT as an undergraduate, where she graduated with a BS in philosophy and physics in 2018. For her PhD thesis, she took the Red Line up to Harvard and worked with Subir Sachdev on understanding exotic properties of strongly-interacting systems of electrons. In an unusual twist of fate, she will be taking the Red Line back to MIT to spend the next several years as a Pappalardo Fellow.

In her free time, Leyna enjoys fire spinning (a hobby introduced to her as an undergraduate at MIT), building electronic synthesizers, and attending the many concerts that Boston has to offer.

Selected Publications

• L. Shackleton and S. Sachdev, Sign-problem-free effective models of triangular lattice quantum antiferromagnets, arXiv:2311.01572 (2023).
• L. Shackleton, L. E. Anderson, P. Kim, and S. Sachdev, Conductance and thermopower fluctuations in interacting quantum dots, arXiv:2309.05741 (2023)
• L. Shackleton and M. S. Scheurer, An exactly solvable dissipative spin liquid, arXiv:2307.05743 (2023).
• L. Shackleton, A. Thomson, and S. Sachdev, Deconfined Criticality and a Gapless Z2 Spin Liquid in the Square-Lattice Antiferromagnet, Phys. Rev. B 104, 045110 (2021)
• L. Shackleton, A. Wietek, A. Georges, and S. Sachdev, Quantum Phase Transition at Nonzero Doping in a Random t-J Model, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 136602 (2021).