Xie Chen

Xie Chen (* around 1984) is a Chinese theoretical solid-state physicist.

Xie Chen studied from 2002 at Tsinghua University with a bachelor's degree in 2006 and then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (as a Whiteman Fellow), where she received her PhD in theory in 2012. As a post-doctoral student , she was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2012 to 2014 . In 2014 she became an Assistant Professor and in 2017 an Associate Professor at Caltech .

It deals with novel (topological) phases (such as symmetry-protected topological orders, symmetry protected topological phases , SPT) and associated phenomena (such as fractional symmetries) in many-body systems, strongly correlated systems, dynamics of quantum many-body systems, tensor network representations and applications in quantum information theory .

Tensor network representations serve the efficient representation of entangled many-body wave functions with area law and were used by Chen and colleagues in particular strongly interacting systems and systems with topological order. She also investigated the phenomenon of symmetry fractionation in systems with internal topological order, in which the fractional statistics of anyon states are also transferred to the representation under global symmetries.

SPT have non-trivial edge states without an excitation threshold (gap) with otherwise normal-looking volume states and are caused by global symmetries such as charge conservation and time-reversal invariance, which provide topological protection . They generalize the phenomena occurring in the theory of topological insulators and superconductors to more general fermion, boson and spin systems. Among other things, she and colleagues classified the possible SPT phases and constructed SPT systems.

In 2017 she became a Sloan Research Fellow and received a National Science Foundation Early Career Award. For 2020 she received the New Horizons in Physics Prize for decisive contributions to the understanding of the topological states of matter and their connections to one another (laudation).

Fonts (selection)

• with Bei Zeng, Zhengcheng Gu, Beni Yoshida, Isaac L. Chuang : Gapped Two-body Hamiltonian whose Unique Ground State is Universal for One-way Quantum Computation , Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 102, 2009, p. 220501, Arxiv
• with Zheng-Cheng Gu, Xiao-Gang Wen : Local Unitary Transformation, Long-Range Quantum Entanglement, Wave Function Renormalization, and Topological Order , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 82, 2010, p. 155138, Arxiv
• with Bei Zeng, Zheng-Cheng Gu, Isaac L. Chuang, Xiao-Gang Wen: Tensor Product Representation of Topological Ordered Phase: Necessary Symmetry Conditions , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 82, 2010, p. 165119, Arxiv
• with Zheng-Xin Liu, Xiao-Gang Wen: Two-dimensional symmetry protected topological orders and their protected gapless edge excitations , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 84, 2011, pp. 235141, Arxiv
• with Zheng-Cheng Gu, Xiao-Gang Wen: Complete classification of one-dimensional gapped quantum phases in interacting spin systems , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 84, 2011, pp. 235128, Arxiv
• with Zheng-Cheng Gu, Xiao-Gang Wen: Classification of Gapped Symmetric Phases in One-dimensional Spin Systems , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 83, 2011, p. 035107, Arxiv
• with Zheng-Cheng Gu, Zheng-Xin Liu, Xiao-Gang Wen: Symmetry Protected Topological Orders in Interacting Bosonic Systems , Science, Volume 338, 2012, p. 1604, Arxiv
• with Zheng-Cheng Gu, Zheng-Xin Liu, Xiao-Gang Wen: Symmetry protected topological orders and the group cohomology of their symmetry group , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 87, 2013, p. 155114, Arxiv
• with Lukasz Fidkowski , A. Vishwanath: Non-Abelian topological order on the surface of a 3D topological superconductor from an exactly solved model , Phys. Rev. X, Volume 3, 2013, p. 041016, Arxiv
• with Lukasz Fidkowski, Ashvin Vishwanath: Symmetry Enforced Non-Abelian Topological Order at the Surface of a Topological Insulator , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 89, 2014, p. 165132, Arxiv
• with Yuan-Ming Lu, Ashvin Vishwanath: Symmetry protected topological phases from decorated domain walls , Nature Communications, Volume 5, 2014, No. 3507, Arxiv
• with Fiona j. Burnell, Ashvin Vishwanath, Lukasz Fidkowski: Anomalous Symmetry Fractionalization and Surface Topological Order , Phys. Rev. X, Volume 5, 2015, p. 041013, Arxiv
• with Ashvin Vishwanath: Gauging 'time reversal symmetry in tensor network states , Phys. Rev. X, Volume 5, 2015, p. 041034, Arxiv
• with Yi-Chen Huang: Quantum circuit complexity of one-dimensional topological phases , Phys. Rev. B, Volume 91, 2015, p. 195143, Arxiv
• with Michael Hermele: Bosonic topological crystalline insulators and anomalous symmetry fractionalization via the flux-fusion anomaly test , Phys. Rev. X, Volume 6, 2016, p. 041006, Arxiv
• Editor with Xiao-Gang Wen, Bei Zeng, Duan-Lu Zhou: Quantum Information Meets Quantum Matter: From Quantum Entanglement to Topological Phases of Many-Body Systems , Springer 2019 ( Arxiv )

Web links

• Website at Caltech

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Description of their research on their homepage