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Theoretical physicists working at a blackboard collaboration pod in the Beecroft building.
Credit: Jack Hobhouse

Paul Fendley

Professor and Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College

Sub department

  • Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics

Research groups

  • Condensed Matter Theory
paul.fendley@physics.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: 01865 (2)73957
Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, room 70.32
  • About
  • Publications

I work on statistical mechanics, studying the collective behaviour of systems with many particles. I typically analyse systems with strong interactions, making use of a variety of powerful mathematical tools. One such tool is integrability, which takes advantage of a panoply of symmetries constraining the system. Another is supersymmetry famous from particle physics,which yields interesting special properties in some interesting condensed-matter systems. Field theory underlies much of theoretical physics, with one particular focus in my work those with conformal symmetry.

These methods of strongly interacting statistical mechanics provide essential tools for analysing condensed matter. One particularly striking phenomenon needing them is when collective and microscopic behaviors are radically different, what now goes under the name of emergence. A prominent example is topological matter, where fractionalised excitations in effect split apart a
system’s constituents. Another is prethermal behaviour, where a system takes essentially forever to reach equilibrium. My work continually goes back and forth between the mathematical and the physical side, as no good understanding of these phenomena comes without taking both seriously.

Research interests

Statistical Mechanics
Mathematical Physics

Selected publications

Integrability and braided tensor categories

Journal of Statistical Physics Springer 182:2 (2021) 43

Large classes of quantum scarred Hamiltonians from matrix product states

Physical Review B American Physical Society 102:8 (2020) 85120
Sanjay Moudgalya, Edward O'Brien, B Andrei Bernevig, Paul Fendley, Nicolas Regnault

Onsager symmetries in $U(1)$ -invariant clock models

Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment IOP Science 2019:April 2019 (2019) 043107
Eric Vernier, Edward O'Brien, Paul Fendley

Lattice supersymmetry and order-disorder coexistence in the tricritical Ising model

Physical Review Letters American Physical Society 120:20 (2018) 206403
E O'Brien, Paul Fendley
178580 178576
See all publications

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