About me
(A few fibres of the Hopf fibration. These fibres turn out to support the edge states of quantum Hall droplets in four space dimensions, which have now been seen in an experiment.)
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I'm a mathematical physicist with a soft spot for emergent geometric phenomena.
My research mostly concerns the geometry of quantum fluids, where particle relabelling symmetry is an emergent gauge redundancy. This is especially striking in topological phases of matter such as quantum Hall droplets, whose low-energy fluid "ripples" are edge states at the system's boundary. In the past, I studied the edge states of gravitation and Chern-Simons theory through the lens of so-called asymptotic symmetries.
Despite obvious differences, these subjects involve common mathematical tools based on infinite-dimensional groups—diffeomorphism groups, Kac-Moody groups, the Virasoro group, etc. In this way, intuition borrowed from the symmetries of gravity helps to predict properties of seemingly unrelated condensed matter systems. I find this universality fascinating.