Ehud Altman

Ehud Altman received his Ph.D. from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), in Haifa in 2002. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard university for three years before joining the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, as a Yigal Alon Fellow in 2005. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor there in 2011. In 2010, he was awarded the Young Investigator Prize from the Israel Physical Society and the Krill Prize of the Wolf Foundation. During the academic year 2012-2013, he was a Miller Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Physics Department of UC Berkeley as a Professor in the summer of 2016.

Altman is interested in condensed matter theory as well as many-body aspects of ultra-cold atomic systems and quantum information theory. Broadly speaking he investigates quantum matter, in which interactions and quantum entanglement between the particles can give rise to unexpected emergent properties. A recent focus of his research is how such emergent behavior unfolds in non equilibrium systems. For example he is trying to understand the phenomenon of many-body localization (MBL), and thermalization in quantum systems. To address these problems he uses a variety of theoretical and numerical tools including field theory, strong disorder renormalization group, tensor networks, quantum Monte Carlo calculations as well as close collaboration with experimental groups. 

Altman’s current research projects investigate many-body localization and thermalization, correlated states of driven systems, ultra-cold quantum matter, and quantum materials.