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Debnajan%2520Chowdhury-007-4946_edited_e

I am an Assistant Professor in the Physics department at Cornell University and currently hold the Joyce A.Yelencsics Rosevear '65 and Frederick M. Rosevear '64 Chair. Here is my official webpage. I am looking for motivated graduate students and postdocs to join my group. I also have projects available for undergraduate students. 
 

I was a Moore fellow, supported by the EPiQS initiative of the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation, in the Physics department at MIT until June 2019. I completed my Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University under the guidance of Prof. Subir Sachdev in 2016. Prior to that, I did my Masters (Integrated-5 year) in Physics from IIT Kanpur, India.

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I work in the branch of theoretical Physics, known as condensed matter Physics, and my aim is to understand the interesting properties of quantum materials, such as unconventional superconductors and quantum spin liquids, from a fundamental microscopic point of view. One of the problems that excites me the most these days is related to the Physics of moiré graphene and other related platforms. I spend a lot of time thinking about exotic forms of metallic quantum criticality, that lie beyond the conventional Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm. I am interested in fundamental aspects of thermalization and many-body quantum chaos, and its relation to transport. In the past, I have worked on many interesting problems in a number of different areas, with a major emphasis on non-equilibrium phenomena in biophysics, synchronization and integrable quantum spin systems.

 

News:

  • [Sep. 2024] Our paper in Nature Communications reports on the observation of a large thermodynamic response in a strongly correlated insulator, and provides an understanding in terms of fractionalized emergent fermionic particles.

  • [July 2024] Congratulations to Dr. Juan Felipe Mendez-Valderrama for successfully defending his thesis! Felipe has accepted a PCCM postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton.  

  • [July 2024] I have been appointed as the Joyce A.Yelencsics Rosevear '65 and Frederick M. Rosevear '64 Assistant Professor.

  • [June 2024] I gave an invited talk at the Gordon Research Conference on Correlated electron systems.

  • [June 2024] I am speaking at a Young Research Leaders workshop on Topological Materials & Beyond, organized by the IAS at HKUST, Hong Kong.

  • [Apr. 2024] My student, Keiran Lewellen, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

  • [Mar. 2024] I gave an invited talk at the APS March meeting in Minneapolis.

  • [Jan. 2024] A theoretical framework to determine the low-energy effective “diamagnetic” response associated with superconductivity and excitonic superfluidity in interacting flat-band models. 

  • [Dec. 2023] I am speaking at a workshop on Correlation & Topology in Quantum Matter organized by KIAS, IBS and PCS in Seoul, Korea.

  • [Dec. 2023] I am speaking at a workshop on Recent Advances in Superconductivity: Theory and Experiment, organized by the University of Florida, Simons Foundation and William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute. 

  • [Sep. 2023] I gave two talks at a workshopQuantum materials with and without quasiparticles, and a conference, Electron Correlations beyond the Quasiparticle Paradigm: Theory and Experiment, at KITP, Santa Barbara.

  • [Aug. 2023] A joint collaboration leads to a microscopic understanding for Planckian transport in a high conductivity oxide material. The theory and experiment papers have appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! Featured in Cornell Chronicle. 

  • [July 2023] Our paper pointing out surprising connections between the phenomenon of jamming and the unconventional dynamics of charge fluctuations in strange metals appears in Nature Communications.

  • [May 2023] Paper addressing the non-perturbative regime of superconductivity in the flat-band limit using exact analytical and numerical methods appears in Physical Review Letters.  

  • [May 2023] I was awarded a New Frontier Grant at Cornell. See related story.

  • [May 2023] Featured on The Academic Minute radio program. See related story

  • [Mar. 2023] A proof-of-principle theoretical demonstration for the unconventional decay of collective density fluctuations in a non-Fermi liquid with a sharp Fermi surface.

  • [Mar. 2023] Paper addressing the fundamental question of how to compute the diamagnetic response for interacting flat-band systems (e.g. moiré materials) appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences!

  • [Feb. 2023] I have been selected as a 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. These two-year fellowships are awarded annually to early career researchers "in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field ". Featured in Cornell Chronicle. 

  • [Feb. 2023] Paper analyzing electrical transport near a continuous bandwidth-tuned Mott transition appears in Physical Review Letters. Featured in Cornell Chronicle. 

  • [Jan. 2023] I received the NSF-CAREER award! This grant will help fund my group's research on strongly correlated gapless phases of quantum matter, going beyond the quasiparticle paradigm. Featured in Cornell Chronicle. 

  • [Jan. 2023] Paper studying the emergence of correlated topological phases in amorphous solids appears in Physical Review Letters.

  • [Dec. 2022] I am speaking at an international workshop on A Quantum Many-body Handshake: Theory and Simulation meet Experiment, organized by the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

  • [Oct. 2022] A proof-of-principle theoretical demonstration for a direct continuous quantum phase transition from a symmetry preserving metal to a Wigner-Mott insulator.

  • [Oct. 2022] Check out my candid conversation with Cornell research to get a glimpse into what our group has been working on!

  • [Sep. 2022] Review article describing a new approach for studying non-Fermi liquids and strange metals appears in Reviews of Modern Physics. 

  • [Aug. 2022] Paper analyzing the validity of heuristic upper bounds on superconducting transition temperatures, and their violations, appears in npj Quantum Materials.

  • [Aug. 2022] I am speaking at an international conference on Strongly correlated matter: From quantum criticality to flat bands, organized by ICTP and the University of Minnesota in Trieste, Italy.

  • [July 2022] I am speaking at CT.QMAT22, an international conference on Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter, organized by the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence in  Würzburg, Germany.

  • [Sep. 2021] Paper studying the role of filling-dependent renormalizations on pairing tendencies in twisted bilayer graphene appears in npj Quantum Materials.

  • [Sep. 2021] Paper with the Mak-Shan group on studying a continuous Mott transition in half-filled moiré superlattices appears in Nature.

  • [June 2021] I received a BSF research grant ("Simulating exotic magnetism and superconductivity in hybrid quantum materials") in collaboration with J. Ruhman, Bar-Ilan University.

  • [June 2021] Pairing in twisted bilayer graphene gets a boost from umklapp processes.

  • [May 2021] A new route to bad metallic behavior in geometrically frustrated models.

  • [Nov. 2020] I am speaking at the (virtual) SPICE workshop on Coherent order and transport in spin-active systems: Interplay between magnetism and superconductivity, organized by the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

  • [Nov. 2020] An unbiased, non-perturbative demonstration of strong-coupling superconductivity with a transition temperature scaling linearly with the interaction strength in a topological "flat-band" model.

  • [June 2020] A new framework for describing "deconfined" metal-insulator transitions. 

  • [June 2020] I wrote a review article for a special issue in Annals of Physics, dedicated to Gerasim Eliashberg on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

  • [Feb. 2020] My paper with the Jarillo-Herrero group on characterizing transport properties of magic-angle graphene has just appeared in Physical Review Letters. See the accompanying Physics viewpoint article by Subir Sachdev.

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