Bio: Professor Taylor Hughes received his bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Florida in 2003, graduating summa cum laude. He subsequently worked as a software engineer for a year as a department of defense contractor. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2009, working in the condensed matter theory group of Professor Shou-Cheng Zhang. His research covered a broad range of subjects from spintronics, to graphene/graphite, to topological insulators. His two primary research contributions as a graduate student are the collaborations which predicted of the existence of a quantum spin Hall state in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells, and secondly constructed the topological response theory of 3D time-reversal invariant topological insulators.
Professor Hughes then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a postdoc under Professor Eduardo Fradkin. During these two years he began developing methods to characterize states of matter using quantum entanglement, most notably, disordered fermionic systems and topological insulator/ordered systems. Additionally he began working on the theory of the topological visco-elastic response in topological insulators.
About the QSQM: The EFRC-QSQM center aims to develop and apply nontrivial quantum sensing to measure and correlate local and nonlocal quantum observables in exotic superconductors, topological crystalline insulators, and strange metals. The center is led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
