RESEARCH

I started my academic career by studying hot and dense quark matter and its phase structure. However, I became interested in the BCS-BEC crossover, which was realized with cold atoms and being a hot topic at that time, and I switched my research field to cold atoms after I moved to USA in the middle of my graduate course. I am particularly interested in universal phenomena that appear across diverse disciplines in physics regardless of microscopic details. The BCS-BEC crossover and the Efimov effect are their representative examples in quantum many-body and few-body physics, respectively. More recently, I am also aimed at developing bottom-up approaches to quantum many-body systems based on knowledge in quantum few-body systems.

I consider cold atoms to be really ideal to advance topological material science because various topological phases can be realized with artificial gauge fields and inter-particle correlations can be controlled with optical lattices and Feshbach resonances. Furthermore, when exotic few-body states such as Efimov states emerge in many-body systems, they can be expected to form novel exotic quasi-particles. I will fully take these freedom and novelty of cold atoms to reveal physics resulting from inter-particle correlations and exotic few-body states in topological phases. I also intend to export novel knowledge on topology developed in material science to other disciplines in physics such as nuclear physics so that new interdisciplinary exchanges are stimulated.

EDUCATION

2002

B.Sc. in Physics, University of Tokyo

2004

M.Sc. in Physics, University of Tokyo

2007

Ph.D. in Physics, University of Tokyo

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

2004 - 2007

JSPS Research Fellow

2007 - 2008

Research Associate, Institute for Nuclear Theory

2008 - 2011

MIT Pappalardo Fellow in Physics

2011 - 2013

J. R. Oppenheimer Fellow, Los Alamos National Lab

2013 - present

Associate Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology

SELECTION OF PUBLICATIONS

"Epsilon expansion for a Fermi gas at infinite scattering length"
Y. Nishida and D. T. Son
Physical Review Letters 97, 050403-1-4 (Aug. 2006)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.050403

"Nonrelativistic conformal field theories"
Y. Nishida and D. T. Son
Physical Review D 76, 086004-1-14 (Oct. 2007)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.76.086004

"Efimov effect in quantum magnets"
Y. Nishida, Y. Kato, and C. D. Batista
Nature Physics 9, 93-97 (Jan. 2013)
DOI: 10.1038/nphys2523

"Super Efimov effect of resonantly interacting fermions in two dimensions"
Y. Nishida, S. Moroz, and D. T. Son
Physical Review Letters 110, 235301-1-4 (Jun. 2013)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.235301