People

Group Leader

Martin Claassen

He/Him/His
claassen@sas.upenn.edu

Martin Claassen is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at University of Pennsylvania and a visiting scholar at the Center for Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute. He joined Penn’s faculty in 2020, and was previously a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute. Martin received his Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University, where he worked on photo-induced topological states of matter and lattice realizations of the fractional quantum Hall effect. He holds an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich.

Martin’s research focuses on the theory of non-equilibrium dynamics and correlated phases in quantum materials – a class of materials with emergent properties that arise from the collective behavior of electrons. Driven by rapid advances in time-resolved experiments, an exciting frontier is the possibility to use external driving such as strong optical pulses to push such materials into non-equilibrium states with novel and useful properties. This poses numerous new and interesting problems: for instance, an interacting quantum system far from equilibrium can in principle exhibit markedly different dynamics when probed on different time scales or possess properties that fundamentally cannot be realized in a conventional solid. His research aims to understand how materials properties, light, and electronic interactions or topology can conspire to realize new states of matter far from equilibrium, and tackles these questions using theoretical techniques and numerical simulations. Recent interests include many-body Floquet states, topological phases, thermalization and dissipation, ultrafast dynamics, and correlated phenomena in two-dimensional moiré heterostructures of van der Waals materials.