Chaudhary group

Biography

I grew up in a small desert town in Rajasthan, India, playing around with cows and peacocks. As a young adult, I moved to New Delhi to study Engineering Physics at Indian Institute of Technology. That’s where I first learned about quantum mechanics and having done my Bachelors project on quantum entanglement, I was keen on doing a PhD on anything to do with quantum mechanics. With this goal but not knowing much about what “anything” is, I moved to Texas to get PhD in Physics at the University of Texas, Austin. There, I first flirted with high energy physics for a bit. But after diligently going to their seminars for a year and still having no idea about who is SUSY, I decided to change tracks. Luckily, I stumbled upon theoretical condensed matter physics, where I found my ideal mix of quantum mechanics, a combination of mathematical rigor with creative thinking, an endless supply of fascinating experimental data, and a very supportive PhD mentor. From there on, after spending my postdoctoral years in Chicago and then in Cambridge, UK, in 2026, I joined Bristol as a Lecturer in Theoretical Physics.

Research Interests & Activities

I am generally interested in systems where the interplay between non-trivial topology and electronic correlations can lead to exotic emergent quantum phenomena that defy all our intuitions. For example, when electrons in topologically special environments interact, they can sometimes behave as if they are their own anti-particles or if they are only a fraction of an electron. If you are shocked to hear that, you are not alone. I was too! Most of my research to date is my efforts in overcoming this shock. Within the general theme of correlated and topological quantum phases of matter, I try to keep a broad approach to research topics. However, below I list some that I have worked on very recently or am currently working on:

(i) Superconductivity in topological flat bands- Recently, a number of experimental results in synthetic two-dimensional matter (for example stacking layers of graphene with certain pattern or interlayer twists) have shown type of superconductivity that challenges the conventional understanding of superconductivity based on weakly interactive BCS theory. These materials are not only very strongly correlated, they have exotic topological features. For example, some of them have time reversal symmetry broken topological phases interplaying with superconductivity. These scenarios are highly unusual, thus require new theoretical insights. They are also thought to be very useful for topologically protected quantum technologies. My previous work has shown that in such scenario vortex lattice structure (a crystalline order in the superconductor’s wavefunction) can be primary driver of topological phase, thus connecting these systems to the emerging field of crystalline topology. Currently, I am interested on a more detailed theory of these systems that goes beyond simple mean-field approximations but also captures fluctuation effects.

(ii) Polarisation, ferroelectricity, and their relations to superconductivity – Polarisation is a phenomenon that is very intuitive and well understood at the high-school chemistry level. For example, water is a polar molecule, where the charge centre and the geometric centre of the molecule do not coincide. In solid-state materials, when the polarisation develops a long-range-order, it becomes a ferroelectric, which have well known technological applications, such as in memory devices. However, the conceptual understanding of polarisation, which is so simple in molecules, become very intricate for periodic solids and one needs to invoke modern quantum mechanics concepts such as Berry phase to understand them. In my recent co-authored works, I have shown a detailed picture of polarisation, where the entire real-space resolution and just the global response is a meaningful physical quantity. Moreover, they are highly relevant in recently discovered two-dimensional layered ferroelectrics and show novel topological features. I have also shown how the fluctuations in the polar order near ferroelectric domain walls can lead to a new mechanism for superconductivity.

(iii) Composite fermion construction without magnetic field- The intuitive understanding of fractional quantum Hall effect is based on the composite Fermion theory, where one attaches external magnetic field to electrons as average flux, and then builds a field theory based on fluctuation around these mean-fields. However, recent discovery of fractional quantum Hall effect without magnetic field in synthetic two-dimensional materials raised some interesting problems on developing field theoretical approach applicable to this more generalised manifestation of fractional quantum Hall effect. I am currently interested in developing such approaches and verifying them with detailed numerical simulations.

My research methodology can be classified as a Condensed Matter Phenomenology, where the primary focus is driven by understanding or predicting new experimental phenomena based on simple models and physical intuition. This way of doing research requires being able to understand the physical constraints and symmetries to come up with simple models and solving them using a combination of analytical methods such as perturbative techniques of quantum field theory and detailed numeric, such as exact diagonalisation, tensor networks, and Density Matrix Renormalisation Group.