Hoi Chun Po 傅凱駿

  • Croucher Tak Wah Mak Innovation Award in 2023 at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  • Fellowship in 2018 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About Hoi Chun Po’s work


Dr Hoi Chun Po is a condensed matter theorist whose main research interests lie in the interplay between locality, symmetries, and topology in quantum many-body physics. Dr Po works broadly across the multiple areas of strongly correlated electrons, topological band theory, the relation between quantum dynamics and quantum information theory, the emergence of correlated phases in twisted moiré devices, as well as the development of general entanglement-based methods for describing quantum many-body states.

Dr Po’s current research addresses the challenges in understanding quantum many-body states, which require a large amount of computational resources to specify. However, it is not clear whether all of the parameters, which are exponentially numerous, play a vital role in determining the limited number of physical observables. The renormalization group and the newer tensor network methods are two approaches that have been used to identify experimentally relevant properties of quantum systems.

Dr Po proposes to combine these two approaches to study highly entangled quantum many-body states, specifically Gaussian states and free-fermion states. The goal is to develop a framework for constructing more general interacting states that could aid in the theoretical description of various quantum materials.


Biography


Dr Hoi Chun Po joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2021 and is currently the Hari Harilela Assistant Professor of Physics there. He obtained his BSc in physics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013. He then began his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and a Hellman Graduate Award. Having obtained his MA in Physics there, he transferred to Harvard University in 2016. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 2018, he moved to MIT as a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2018 to 2021, he was the recipient of an honorary Croucher Foundation Fellowship for Postdoctoral Research. His research is currently receiving support from a Croucher Tak Wah Mak Innovation Award.