Xu, Shenglong

I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, in 2017. After a three-year-long postdoc at the University of Maryland, I joined Texas A&M in 2020. My research area is condensed matter theory and quantum many-body physics, which, broadly speaking, studies the emergent collective behavior of many particles that interact with each other following the law of quantum mechanics.

My current research interest focuses on quantum many-body dynamics. During unitary time evolution, a simple initial quantum state typically becomes more and more complicated due to the rapid generation of entanglement entropy. I am interested in understanding the growth of the complexity and the entanglement structure in generic quantum systems, for instance, thermalization and scrambling dynamics. I'm also interested in designing quantum protocols consisting of unitary operations and measurements to control the quantum dynamics and engineer quantum states with interesting entanglement structures.

One of my other interests is developing efficient numerical algorithms to simulate quantum many-body systems. Because of the large Hilbert space, it is intractable to simulate a quantum many-body system on a classical computer exactly. Nevertheless, in many cases, the behavior of local observables of the quantum state, such as charge and energy, are more important than the state itself. The goal is to develop efficient algorithms, such as quantum Monte Carlo, tensor networks, and machine learning, to understand the behavior of the local observables without the full knowledge of the state.

News Highlights

• Viewpoint: Surfing on a Wave of Quantum Chaos
• Accessing scrambling in quantum systems using matrix product operators