Office: Duane F-615 (in Gamow Tower) email: michael dot hermele at colorado dot edu Phone: (303) 492-7466 Fax: (303) 492-3352 Office hours this semester: Wednesday 10am-11am, Thursday 2pm-4pm, and by appointment

I am a condensed matter theorist in the Department of Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder. My research focuses on strongly correlated quantum systems, where interactions among many quantum particles are strong enough to lead to striking qualitative effects. This happens in a vast array of solid state materials, as well as in cold atomic gases. At low energies and long distances, a correlated system behaves like its own little universe, with its own set of particle excitations, and rules governing the interactions among those particles. Most dramatically, in some cases the low-energy particles and interactions bear remarkably little resemblance to the microscopic particles from which the system is built. One of my main interests is to understand this sort of striking collective behavior.

My Background

I graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in Physics in 2001. I pursued my graduate studies at University of California Santa Barbara, where my advisor was Matthew P. A. Fisher. While at UCSB, I was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow, supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. I received my PhD in 2005, and moved to MIT where I was a postdoc in the condensed matter theory group until 2007, when I joined the physics department here in Boulder as an assistant professor.