Assistant Professor Shinsei Ryu has been selected for a Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The two-year fellowships are awarded annually to 126 early-career scientists and scholars engaged in fundamental research, in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.
Ryu is a condensed matter theorist who has made ground-breaking discoveries in the roles of coherence, entanglement, and topology in quantum many-body systems. He is perhaps most noted for his development of a “periodic table” classification system for topological insulators and superconductors in three spatial dimensions, devised with collaborators Andreas Schnyder of the Max-Planck-Institut, Akira Furusaki of the University of Tokyo, and Andreas Ludwig of the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Ryu’s broad research interests are reflected in a long list of publications in peer-reviewed journals, with subjects ranging from strongly correlated phenomena in microscopic systems, including quantum magnetism and the fractional quantum Hall effect, to the behaviors of mesoscopic systems, especially carbon nanotubes, graphene, and topological insulators. A unifying focus of Ryu’s work has been elucidating the roles of the phase degree of freedom of wave functions and entanglement in quantum mechanical systems.
In his recent work, Ryu is developing a classification table of topological phases in topological insulators and superconductors, including quantum spin Hall effect and three-dimensional time-reversal symmetry. Another theme he is currently working on includes the use of quantum entanglement, and in particular the entanglement entropy, to characterize and classify strongly interacting many-body systems and quantum field theories.
Ryu is a member of the Institute of Condensed Matter Theory in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of the 2012 Condensed Matter Science Prize of Japan.
Ryu received his bachelor’s degree in physics and his master’s, and doctoral degrees in applied physics from the University of Tokyo in 2000, 2002, and 2005, respectively. His doctoral thesis advisor was Yasuhiro Hatsugai.
Ryu completed his first postdoctoral appointment at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (2005–2008), where he worked with Tadashi Takayanagi to elucidate a holographic derivation of the entanglement entropy in quantum field theories from anti–de Sitter field theory; the formalism they introduced is now known as the “Ryu–Takayanagi formula.”
Ryu went on to complete a second postdoctoral appointment at the University of California at Berkeley (2008–2011), where he continued to use high-energy theory, and more specifically string theory, to inform discoveries in condensed matter relating to topological insulators and superconductors.
Ryu joined the faculty at Physics Illinois in 2011.