Professor Xia-Ji Liu

PhD candidate and honours supervision

Higher degrees by research

Accredited to supervise Masters & Doctoral students as Principal Supervisor.

PhD topics and outlines

Exotic Superfluidity: Superfluidity - the ability to flow with zero resistance – is a property of many materials. In the work by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer was shown that the essential ingredient for all superfluids is the ability of fermions to form pairs. Yet, not all the pairing mechanisms in superfluids follow the simple BCS picture. Here, we are interested in the characterization of exotic superfluidity.

Making Strongly Interacting Photons: This project expects to make a breakthrough in our understanding of polaritons in the strongly interacting regime far from equilibrium and fill in the knowledge gap towards the realisation of a superfluid of light at room temperature

Quantum Virial Expansion : Quantum virial expansion is an entirely new direction to handle strong correlations. It allows a controllable expansion to be worked out even in three dimensions, in terms of a small parameter - the fugacity. It provides an elegant way to bridge the few-body and the many-body worlds. Our specific schemes in this topic include the high-order virial coefficients et al.

Ultracold Atoms with Synthetic Spin-Orbit Coupling: The key ingredient of quantum simulation of topological materials, spin-orbit coupling between ultracold atoms, was just engineered in 2011, as reported in a Nature paper by NIST. Quantum simulation opens a new paradigm for the study of topological materials. Here, we are interested in the characterization of topological superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates with non-trivial spin-textures.

Honours

Available to supervise honours students.

Honours topics and outlines

Quantum Fluids of Light: Polaritons - often referred to as quantum fluids of light – are half-light, half-matter “particles” that keep most characteristics of the underlying photons but also possess intrinsic nonlinearities for easy manipulation. In this project we will review recent development in this field and develop theoretical method to investigate quantum fluids of light.

Ultradilute quantum droplets: Over the past few years, a newly discovered phase of ultracold, dilute quantum droplets has attracted increasingly attention in different fields of physics. The purpose of this project is to develop better microscopic theories of quantum droplets and to solve some challenging theoretical difficulties in this field.