“Quoting the famous lines from Liang Qichao’s "Youth China", I express my blessings to Westlake University: ‘The morning sun is rising in the sky, bright and brilliant; the Yellow River is running to the sea, mighty and magnificent,…, Profound history in our hearts, and extended roads before our eyes. Look forward to our future as wide as ocean, great and grand.’ So majestic is our Westlake youth, and ‘the virtuous bear duties onerous’. So robust is our young Westlake, and ‘heaven rewards those who are industrious’.”
Biography
Congjun Wu was born in 1975 in Anhui Province, China. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Tsinghua University in 1997, a Master of Science degree from Peking University in 2000, and a Ph. D. degree of Physics from Stanford University in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he did postdoctoral research in Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego in 2007 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2011 and full professor in 2017. In 2008, he was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship and the "Outstanding Young Researcher Award" of “Overseas Chinese Physics Association” (It was renamed “the International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers”). He was elected to a fellow of American Physical Society in 2018. Now he has joined Westlake University fulltime and is employed as a chair professor of physics.
Research
Professor Wu, Congjun’s research interest is the exploration of new states of matter and their deep-level organizing principles, including superconductivity, quantum magnetism, orbital physics, topological states, strongly correlated cold atom systems, mathematical physics, and quantum Monte-Carlo simulations. His research is at the interdisciplinary frontier of condensed matter physics and cold atom physics, focusing on the core issues in strong correlation physics and topological physics. His research pursues the unification of the mathematical beauty and the physical reality, especially the application of the symmetry principle in physical systems.
His representative works are listed below.
1）Dynamics: His group proposed the concept of “space-time group” as the mathematical basis for the crystalline symmetry of dynamic systems.
2）Topological physics: He identified the correspondence between the high-dimensional Landau level and the quaternionic analytic function; he proposed the concept of “helical Luttinger edge liquid”, which is one of the earliest studies of interacting topological states and is widely adopted in literature; he was among the early researchers on flat-band and topological physics in p-orbital band systems.
3）Strong correlation physics: He contributed to the non-perturbative studies of itinerant magnetism and the Curie-Weiss metal state, and generalized itinerant ferromagnetism to its unconventional symmetric counterparts (e.g. p-wave). He proposed time-reversal symmetry breaking pairing states for iron-based superconductors.
4）Cold atom physics: He pioneered the study of large-spin cold fermions from the perspective of high symmetries (SU(N), Sp(N)), building up a connection to high energy physics; he is one of the researchers who pioneered the study of orbital physics in optical lattices, and proposed the concept of “unconventional Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC)” which was later observed experimentally; he is also an early researcher of spin-orbit coupled BECs.
5）Numerical methods: He proposed the positive-definitive conditions for the quantum Monte-Carlo sign-problem based on symplectic symmetries, and applied it to simulations on new states of matter.
Representative Publications
1）Shenglong Xu, Congjun Wu, “Space-time crystal and space-time group”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120,096401 (2018).
2）Zhong-chao Wei, Congjun Wu, Yi Li, Shi-Wei Zhang, Tao Xiang, “Majorana Positivity and the Fermion sign problem of Quantum Monte Carlo Simulations”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 250601, (2016).
3）Shenglong Xu, Yi Li, Congjun Wu, “Sign-Problem-Free Quantum Monte Carlo Study on Thermodynamic Properties and Magnetic Phase Transitions in Orbital-Active Itinerant Ferromagnets”, Phys. Rev. X 5, 021032, (2015).
4）Yi Li, E. H. Lieb, Congjun Wu, “Exact Results on Itinerant Ferromagnetism in Multi-orbital Systems on Square and Cubic Lattices”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 217201 (2014).
5）Yi Li, Congjun Wu, “High-Dimensional Topological Insulators with Quaternionic Analytic Landau Levels”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 216802 (2013).
6）Congjun Wu, Ian Mondragon Shem, and Xiang-Fa Zhou, “Unconventional Bose-Einstein condensations from spin-orbit coupling” , Chin. Phys. Lett. 28, 097102 (2011) (arXiv:0809.3532)
7）Congjun Wu, Doron Bergman, Leon Balents, and S. Das Sarma, “Flat bands and Wigner crystallization in the honeycomb optical lattice”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 70401 (2007).
8）Congjun Wu, B. Andrei Bernevig, and Shou-Cheng Zhang, “The helical liquid and the edge of quantum spin Hall systems”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 106401(2006).
9）Congjun Wu, Jiangping Hu, and Shou-Cheng Zhang, “Exact SO(5) symmetry in spin 3/2 fermionic systems”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 , 186402 (2003).
10）Congjun Wu and Shou-Cheng Zhang, “Dynamic generation of spin-orbit coupling”, Phys. Rev.Lett. 93, 36403 (2004).
Contact Us
Email：wucongjun@westlake.edu.cn