Education
Sachdev was educated in India before attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics.
physicist university professor
Sachdev was educated in India before attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics.
He is known for his research on quantum phase transitions, and for a textbook on the subject. In particular, he is famous for exploiting a connection between the electronic properties of materials near a quantum phase transition and the quantum theory of black holes. He held professional positions at Bell Labs (1985–1987) and at Yale University (1987–2005), where he was a Professor of Physics, before returning to Harvard.
He currently holds visiting positions at various universities.
Juan Maldacena discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence of string theory in 1997. In 2007, Sachdev, along with Christopher Herzog, Pavel Kovtun and Dam Thanh Son first used the AdS/CFT correspondence of string theory to study quantum critical points in condensed matter physics such as the superfluid-insulator transition in the 2+1 dimensional boson Hubbard model.
With Sean Hartnoll and Markus Müller, Sachdev developed related methods to apply to "strange metal" phases at generic particle densities. These condensed matter systems share the crucial property of having no quasiparticle excitations, and so their dynamics cannot be described by extensions of the Boltzmann equation ubiquitous in other systems
In 2014, Sachdev collaborated on a paper in Science which correctly predicted the appearance of charge-density waves in high temperature cuprate oxide superconductors.
National Academy of Sciences.