I'm a physicist with a background in mathematics, interested in symmetry, topology, and beyond-perturbative methods in many-body systems, from quantum condensed matter and statistical mechanics to high-energy physics. This is my personal website.
We are running a CMT Journal Club on Wednesdays at 12-1pm (intro talk) and 3-4pm (research talk) in the Schwinger lounge. Email me and I will add you to the email list.
I am admin of the anomalology discord. Send me an email and I will send you an invite! We are running a regular zoom seminar every other tuesday. Recordings can be found here.
You can contact me at first dot last at physics dot ucla dot edu and you can find me in Knudsen 6-137C.
With Lukasz Fidkowski and John Preskill we found disentanglers for anomaly-free combinations of chiral symmetries in 1+1D and 3+1D, opening a new path towards chiral gauge theories and the ultimate goal of realizing the Standard Model on the lattice.
With Sasza Czajka and Roman Geiko we studied anomalies of quantum lattice Hamiltonians which lead us to a definition of the loop spectrum of invertible states and a space of quantum cellular automata.
My postdoc Roman Geiko is looking for a job!
With Nick G. Jones, Ruben Verresen, and Abhishodh Prakash we made a systematic study of the relationship between charge pumps, anomalous pivot/entangler symmetries, and SPTs.
With Lei Gioia we found Hamiltonian lattice models of chiral fermions in 3+1D and 2+1D protected by exact anomalous symmetries.
New kinds of gapless topological states and phase transitions between topological phases.
Quantum error correction (aspirationally).
"Quantum cellular automata" and how they relate to gapped phases (check out our paper!)
Chiral gauge theories on the lattice (we recently made progress toward hypercharge in the Standard Model!)
The background of this page draws a randomly selected 5-state cellular automata, where a pixel's state depends only on the average of the previous state of itself and its two neighbors. There are 5^13 such rules. Press c to change the color scheme. Here is Toom's rule, a particularly interesting 2d 2-state automaton.
Here is a picture of me on a sand dune in Death Valley, excited to have found some scale invariant criticality in the wild! My hair is not as long now :)
