10/27/2025
By Amanda Vozzo

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

Physics Colloquium
Date: Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025
Time: 4 – 5 p.m.
Location: Olsen 503

Aashish Clerk, Professor of Molecular Engineering, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago will give a talk on “One-way quantum interactions for fun and profit.”

Abstract: The most common kinds of interactions in physics obey reciprocity: when two systems or particles interact, each one influences the other, and information flows in both directions. In this talk, I’ll discuss general methods for engineering interactions that break this symmetry, in a fully consistent quantum setting. These engineered “one-way” quantum interactions open up a host of unusual possibilities, from new methods for manipulating and processing quantum information, to new kinds of topological and many-body physics. I’ll introduce some of the basic theoretical ideas that underlie these unusual interactions, and connections to recent interest in “non-Hermitian” quantum systems. I’ll also discuss connections to the bosonic Kitaev chain model, a model that is the bosonic analogue of Kitaev’s celebrated model of a 1D fermionic p-wave superconductor, and that has nonreciprocal properties. This system exhibits a surprising entanglement phase transition, can act as an exponentially enhanced quantum sensor, and has recently been realized in two different experimental platforms.

Bio: Aashish Clerk’s research focuses on understanding complex phenomena in quantum systems that are both strongly driven and subject to dissipation. Such effects are not only interesting from a fundamental perspective, but can also enable quantum technologies to transcend the limitations of purely classical systems. His group’s work intersects the fields of condensed matter physics, quantum optics, and quantum information.

Clerk received his bachelor's in science in 1996 from the University of Toronto and a doctorate in Physics from Cornell University in 2001. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University until 2004 when he joined the faculty at McGill University and concurrently served as a Canada Research Chair. Clerk joined the University of Chicago as a faculty member in 2017.

Clerk’s honors include being appointed a Simons Investigator in Theoretical Physics in 2020, as well as receiving a Sloan Research Fellowship, an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from Canada’s National Science and Engineering Research Council, the Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from the Royal Society of Canada, and a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics.