Arnab Banerjee

NOTE: E-mail addresses end with @purdue.edu

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Group:

Faculty

Office:

PHYS 168

Phone:

(765) 494-3028

E-mail:

arnabb

Website:

[Homepage]

Education

Experience

Updates

I am open to collaborations on quantum magnetism! I also have a guest scientist appointment with the Quantum Science Center at ORNL. Stay tuned.

I am hiring in low-temperature physics (milli-Kelvin electronics) and material characterization. If you are interested in working with me, please email me. 

Research Theme

A significant amount of human progress has been driven by the discovery and control of materials with exceptional properties. This includes the development of modern computers which derived from the control of Silicon or the electric cars which have followed the advancement of Lithium batteries. In the past few decades, the power of material-derived electronics has grown exponentially fast as described by Moore's Law. However, it is now very apparent that the growth will slow down unless we can capture and control the quantum effects in materials that arise from quantum zero-point motion and Heisenberg's uncertainty. How do we do that? The goal of my research is to understand the quantum properties of materials towards making them useful for tomorrow's technology. My research provides insights into new quantum phenomenology in new magnetic materials both in the bulk and device geometries using reciprocal space, such as neutron scattering, and millikelvin transport techniques when the data is mapped into appropriate, preferably quantum models to capture the effects of zero-point motion, fractionalization, quantization, and coherence. 

Teaching

I am teaching Physics-515, Statistical Physics, Spring semester to physics Honors students and masters students. Bring on the uncertainty! 

Previous courses taught: Physics-172, Matter and Interactions (Freshman Engineering students) Fall, Spring - 2021,2022, and Physics-461, Quantum Physics II, in the Spring semester to physics Honors and masters students in 2022, 2023, 2024.

Honors and Awards

Group Members 2025 (Please feel free to contact any of them for more information):

• Current Post-Docs: Dr. Luis Leao (Ph.D., UPFE, Brazil, P.D. Cornell U.).
• Current PhD students in our group:
  • Norhan Eassa Mahmoud (Quantum Computation), 
  • Guga Khundzakishvili (Experiments Neutrons),
  • Jhinkyu Choi (Experiments Low Temperature),
  • Ammar Ali (Quantum Computation),
  • Keerthi Kumaran (Quantum Computations),
  • Bishnu Belbase (Experiments Neutrons), 
  • Mohan Bikram Neupane (Experiments)
• Current PhD students affiliated with our group:
  • Hanjing Xu (Computer Science, working with Prof. Alex Pothen, Computer Science).
• Current UG students:
  • Lauren Bell (Physics),
  • Gustavo Suez-Cruz (Physics),
  • Pravin Mahendran (Computer Science),
  • Kevin Wang (Computer Science).
• Group Alumni:
  • Dr. Kiranmayi Dixit (PhD Student 2020-2024, Intel, Hillsboro),
  • Dr. Samudra Dasgupta (Visiting Scholar 2020, AWS, Bay Area),
  • Dimitrios Kromyddas (Masters Student 2020, PhD Student, Leiden University),
  • Akshat Jha (UG Student 2022, Imperial College, London),
  • Amit Rohan Rajapurohita (UG Student 2021-2022, Cornell University, Ithaca),
  • Prof. Gavin Hester (Post-Doc 2022-2023, Tenure Track Faculty, Brock University, Canada),
  • Dr. Arjun Unnakrishnan (Post-Doc 2023-2024, Inspire Faculty - IISc Bangalore).

News and Updates:

February-2025: W.M. KECK FOUNDATION GRANT: Honored to lead a $1.2M grant from the Keck Foundation with Profs. Vlad Shalaev, Pramey Upadhyaya, Alexandra Boltasseva and Johannes Knolle to optically investigate Majorana bound states in Kitaev Quantum Spin Liquids.

• News Release: https://www.physics.purdue.edu/news/2025/0211_keck_banerjee.html 

January-2025: CONGRATULATIONS ON PHD: Dr. Kiranmayi Dixit (first PhD student of my group, 2020 - 2024) for braving the pandemic, and graduating (Thesis: Excitations in RuCl3) and starting her new position as Process Engineer at INTEL. 

January-2025: PRE-PRINT: QUTRIT AKLT: We demonstrated S=1 chain and the celebrated AKLT model and demonstrated edge modes, Berry Phase using Qutrits(!) implemented in IBM-Q. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19786 

December-2024: PUBLICATION: NATURE COMMUNICATION: TOPOLOGICAL SCALING ON D-WAVE: Ammar and Hanjing simulated triangular lattice antiferromagnetic using coherent annealing on D-Wave to show topological physics and features difficult to calculate using classical means! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54701-4 

• News Release: https://www.physics.purdue.edu/news/2025/simulating-the-quantum-world-purdue-researchers-get-cold-with-quantum-coarsening.html 

December-2024: PUBLICATION: PHYS. REV. B: DROSOPHILA OF ENTANGLED SPINS: Norhan simulated with class-leading fidelity an entangled spin pair (splitting of a triplet state with magnetic field) allowing us to resolve energies with very high frequencies, comparable to experimental probes. https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.110.184414 

• Editor's Suggestion in Phys. Rev. B.

November-2024: PUBLICATION: NPJ-QUANTUM INFORMATION: THERMODYNAMICS OF SPIN-CHAIN HAMILTONIANS: Norhan, working with IBM-Q, simulated the heat capacity and dynamic structure factor of a spin chain at finite temperatures. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41534-024-00887-w 

August-2024: THANK YOU: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, for bestowing me the Young Alumni Achiever Award for 2024. I couldn't do it without you.

May-2024: CONGRATULATIONS: Norhan Eassa (Ph.D. candidate) for securing one-year research fellowship at GOOGLE, Santa Barbara, to work on their quantum computer.

April-2024: SUMMER INTERNSHIPS: Congratulations Keerthi Kumaran for securing summer internship at IBM-Q, Yorktown Heights. Congratulations Ammar Ali for securing summer internship at ORNL.

December-2023: CONGRATULATIONS: Guga Khundzakishvili, for ORAU Graduate Research Fellowship for research performed at ORNL.

April-2023: CONGRATULATIONS: Amit Rajapurohita and George Economou for getting accepted for PhD programs in Cornell University and Purdue University, respectively.

Mar-2023: PUBLICATION: ENTROPY: Hanjing Xu and Samudra Dasgupta for paper published in Entropy https://doi.org/10.3390/e25030541 on novel use of Ising qubit machine for a societal problem.

January-2023: CONGRATULATIONS: Dr. Gavin Hester (first post-doc in my group) for starting new position as Assistant Professor in Physics (tenure-track) at Brock University, Hamilton, Canada. https://www.physics.brocku.ca/People/Faculty/Hester/ 

July-2022: DOE GRANT: "Seeking Quasiparticles Using Low-Energy Spectroscopy": Our group is now funded by the Department of Energy - Basic Energy Sciences to perform neutron investigations of triangular and Kitaev quantum spin liquids to investigate low energy dynamics using neutron spin echo and polarized neutron scattering techniques - including in-situ and in-operando techniques where a current is passed through the sample. Grant funds Bishnu Belbase, Guga Khundzakishvili (Graduate Students) and Gavin Hester (post-doc).

May-2021: THANK YOU: Students for nominating me for the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching for Quantum Physics II.

April-2021: CONGRATULATIONS: Norhan Eassa (Ph.D. Candidate) and Kiranmayi Dixit (Ph.D. Candidate) from our group for Lijuan Wang Award for Women Excellence in Research.

January-2021: CONGRATULATIONS Kiranmayi Dixit (Ph.D. Candidate), for paper published in Physical Rev. Research, on phonon measurements on RuCl3. Kiran is co-first and co-corresponding author. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.013067 

December-2021: CONGRATULATIONS, Alshat (UG), Eliana (UG), and Guga (Ph.D. Candidate), for the paper accepted in IEEE - Reeboting Computing for work with Fujitsu Inc on the Shastry-Sutherland model.

July-2021: Our group is now Slacking. If you want to be a part of the discussion in the group as a guest and to know the work in the group, please email me.

July-2021: CONGRATULATIONS: Akshat Anand Jha, (UG-Physics 2021) from our group for getting accepted for graduate studies at Imperial College, London.

May-2021: CONGRATULATIONS: Eliana Soyanoff, (UG-Computer Science, 2023) for securing NSF-REU Fellowship in our group for working on a joint project on frustrated magnetism and applications to neutron scattering.

April-2021: WELCOME: Gavin Hester (Ph.D., Kate Ross group at U-Colorado), joins the group as our first post-doctoral candidate.

April-2021: CONGRATULATIONS: Hanjing Xu, (PhD candidate, Department of Computer Science), working closely with our group, for securing a summer internship at Fujitsu Corp. working on Ising Digital Annealing.

April-2021: CONGRATULATIONS: Norhan Eassa Mahmoud, (PhD candidate, Department of Physics), in our group for securing Summer Internship at IBM-Q, Almaden with Jeffrey Cohn and Barbara Jones.

December-2021: DOE GRANT: Our group secured the DOE - Quantum Science Center (www.qscience.org) grant under the National Quantum Initiative, to study avenues aiding future quantum computing technologies. The total project is worth $115M and is administered by ORNL. Our laboratory is participating in two subprojects:  (1) Material Design, Characterization and Transport studies of Kitaev Quantum Spin Liquid platforms for future applications (Grad Student: Kiranmayi Dixit), (2) Use of near-term NISQ quantum hardware for the analysis of neutron scattering data on frustrated quantum magnets towards the search for topological physics. (Grad Students: Norhan Eassa Mahmoud, Bilal Khlid).

July-2020: CONGRATULATIONS: Kiranmayi Dixit (PhD Candidate, Department of Physics) from our group for the Ralf Scharenberg Fellowship.

April-2020: CONGRATULATIONS: Samudra Dasgupta, for getting accepted in Bredesen Center at Univ. Tenn., Knoxville for doing research with the Quantum Computing Institute at ORNL.

January-2020: Joined Purdue formally. Teaching PHYS-172 and then Oh! Covid.