Steven Thomson Email & Phone Number

United Kingdom

Berlin, Germany

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow working in the group of Prof. Jens Eisert on the European Commission Horizon 2020 Project "Ergodicity Breaking in Quantum Matter: From Many-Body Localisation to Quantum Glasses" - https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101031489

Paris, Île-De-France, France

Employed on a short-term bridge contract by Dr Marco Schiró to produce further work on flow equations applied to driven systems and quasiperiodic models, as well as playing a supporting role in ongoing work on Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models, building on unpublished earlier work.

Palaiseau, France

Postdoc in the group of Prof. Laurent Sanchez-Palencia, worked on tensor network simulations and development of quench spectroscopic techniques. Closely involved in the supervision of several graduate students, particularly during the pandemic when we were unable to work in person and I took on the role of ensuring continuity of group activities via online platforms and videoconferencing.

Gif-Sur-Yvette, France

At IPhT, I studied many-body localisation in the group of Marco Schiró at the Institute de Physique Théorique (CEA Paris-Saclay) and Collège de France, where we worked to combine insights from non-equilibrium physics with quantum disordered systems to study a relatively new type of behaviour known as many-body localisation, the many-body equivalent of Anderson localisation. In this role, we developed a new numerical technique for the simulation of disordered quantum systems, known as the Flow Equation method.

St Andrews, Scotland

With my PhD advisor Frank Krüger, I worked on disordered lattice gases of bosons using renormalisation group techniques, and showed that the Bose glass phase exhibits the unexpected property of replica symmetry breaking, a paradigmatic property of spin glass systems which was not expected to exist in the Bose glass phase due to the ostensible lack of geometric frustation. I then went on to show that this replica symmetry breaking is critical to the correct description of disordered dimerised quantum antiferromagnets, and in so doing I also found the first analytic evidence for the presence of an unusual incompressible Mott glass phase in the disordered Bose-Hubbard model, contrary to the suggestions that this phase could not exist in the presence it random-mass disorder. Earlier in my PhD I also worked on fermionic quantum order-by-disorder to study the effects of quenched charge impurities on the suggested phase reconstruction in the vicinity of the avoided ferromagnetic quantum critical point. There I found that the addition of impurities led to the formation of a novel helical glass phase (a sort of 'melted' spiral magnet) with peculiar properties similar to those seen in CeFePO.Together with experimental atomic physicists Graham Bruce and Tiffany Harte and then Masters student Liam Walker, I conducted a numerical investigation into the use of quantum gas microscopes for imaging disordered quantum systems and provided mean-field numerical simulations of experimental setups designed to motivate further use of quantum gas microscopes in this way. I've also conducted some previous work on spin density waves in 2D systems, and the characterisation of nodal hypersurfaces of fermionic wavefunctions.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Theoretical Physics

Mphys, Theoretical Physics, 1