M. Zahid Hasan
M. Zahid Hasan is an endowed chair Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He is known for his pioneering research on quantum matter exhibiting topological and emergent properties. He is the Principal Investigator of Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Advanced Spectroscopy at Princeton University and a Visiting Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Since 2014 he has been an EPiQS-Moore Investigator awarded by the Betty and Gordon Moore foundation in Palo Alto for his research on emergent quantum phenomena in topological matter. He has been a Vanguard Fellow of the Aspen Institute since 2014. Hasan is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Hasan completed his higher secondary schooling at Dhaka College, then studied physics and mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2002 from Stanford University, working at SLAC/Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was then a Robert H. Dicke Fellow in fundamental physics at Princeton and held visiting appointments at Bell Labs and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and joined the faculty rank at Princeton University. While at the University of Texas at Austin his research focused on Dirac monopole field theory and quantum gravity upon completing coursework with Steven Weinberg and others at the Weinberg Theory Center in the 1990s. Later while at Stanford University he became interested in exploring quantum many-body phenomena in unconventional superconductors and in developing new spectroscopic techniques at SLAC. In 2016-2017 he joined Miller Institute of Basic Research in Science as a Visiting Miller Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Since 2017, he holds the Eugene Higgins endowed professorship at Princeton University. According to an interview conducted by U.S. DOE and other news media, he was motivated to work on emergent quantum phenomena and the Standard Model analogs in materials following scientific exchanges with his Princeton colleague Philip W. Anderson in the early 2000s. In a 2009 news release published by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Anderson commented on Hasan’s early career work : "As a technical achievement, or a series of physics achievements alone, it is pretty spectacular," "For theoreticians," Anderson added, "the observation of such quantum effect is both interesting and significant." Continuing along the same line of research but more broadly on quantum matter he published several high-impact papers and in 2017 he was invited to deliver the Sir Nevill Mott lecture series in physics, UC-Berkeley Miller Institute professorship lectures in science, the S.N. Bose seminar in fundamental physics, Aspen public lecture, ICTP, HKUST and many other endowed or public lectures, colloquia and plenary talks around the world. He has been one of the featured scientists on the occasion of Albert Einstein Annus Mirabilis at U.S. Department of Energy in connection to his work on photoelectric effect based spectroscopy of quantum states of matter. He also served on the Einstein Annus Mirabilis committee at Princeton University.
Hasan's research is focused on fundamental condensed matter physics - either searching for, or in-depth exploration of novel phases of electronic matter. He is an expert in the physics of quantum matter in relation to condensed matter version of Dirac equation, Dirac monopole, quantum field theory, quantum magnetism, superconductivity, topological phenomena,
and advanced spectroscopic, scattering, sub-atomic resolution imaging-microscopy techniques. In exploration of emergence in quantum systems, his research has focused on strongly correlated materials, broken symmetry, low-D antiferromagnetism, doped Mott phenomena and superconductivity, symmetry protection and breaking in Dirac matter, vortex-lattice phase transition, quantum Hall-like topological phases, Mott insulators, Kondo insulators/heavy fermions and Anderson impurity physics, quantum spin chains/liquids, cuprate spin-1/2 ladders, exotic superconductors, quantum phase transitions, mass generation of Dirac fermions in solids, Dirac cone superconductivity, and topological quantum matter. He played a pioneering role in demonstrating momentum-tuned resonant X-ray photon scattering technique and nature of collective modes in Mott insulators and spin-1/2 quantum chains exhibiting spin-charge separation type electron fractionalization; quasiparticle quantum coherence, Mott-Hubbard physics in superconductors and related thermoelectrics, momentum-space emergent monopole, and also in the experimental discoveries of topological insulators in 3D materials, hedgehog spin-textures in magnets, space-group protected Dirac insulators and related matter, CDW-melted superconductors, demonstration of exception to Anderson theorem in unconventional superconductors, Chern magnets, Weyl magnets, topological conductors, helical superconductors, nodal-line semimetals and drumhead states, Lorentz-violating materials, signatures of Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomaly analogs, non-Fermi-liquid magnetic and thermoelectric metals, Majorana zero modes in two different classes of strong spin-orbit superconductors, spin-helical states avoiding Anderson localization and topological metals, novel Weyl materials, Dirac matter on artificial topological lattice, Hopf-link metals, Berry curvature tunable magnets, topological chiral crystals, Kagome topological magnets and related new forms of quantum matter using state-of-the-art spectroscopy, scattering and microscopy techniques in combination with theories of matter. He co-proposed and co-led the scattering-spectroscopy MERLIN beam-line and end-station facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and developed a laboratory for ultrafast and coherent quantum phenomena at Princeton University.
A highly cited researcher listed in World's-Most-Influential-Scientific-Minds, Hasan has published more than 200 research papers and articles on a variety of topics noted above. Many of his papers in Physical Review Letters, Nature and Science have been identified as "hot papers in the field" by Web of Science and highlighted in the "Search and Discovery" news section of Physics Today, PhysicsWorld, Discover magazine, Scientific American, Physics, IEEE Spectrum magazine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and other international science media. His research papers on Weyl fermionic semimetals received more than 5,000 citations and was named a Top-10 breakthrough of the year by PhysicsWorld and his topological materials work was listed among the top ten papers by Physics with criterion including "topics that really made waves in and beyond the physics community". This work was also featured in Physics Today. He is co-inventor of the United States Patent on Weyl topological semimetal discovery methods. He has contributed in realizing several Standard Model or QFT analogs and extensions including emergent Lorentz violation and topological response in condensed matter systems.
Fundamental knowledge frontiers developed by some of his works are now part of the pedagogical paradigm in the field. Several of his highly-cited research results noted above, published over the last two decades, are also discussed, featured or highlighted in several recent popular textbooks of condensed matter physics that are currently in use at many universities around the world.