Dr. Pixley received his BS in Physics and BA in Pure Mathematics (with highest honors in both) from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) completing a thesis with Prof. A. Peter Young. He then received his PhD in Physics from Rice University in 2014, focusing on condensed matter theory under the guidance of Prof. Qimiao Si. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland with Prof. Sankar Das Sarma from 2014-2017, he joined the Physics and Astronomy department of Rutgers University as an Assistant Professor. In July 2022 he was promoted to Associate Professor and elected the Associate Director of the Center for Materials Theory under the Director Gabi Kotliar. He is a long-term visiting scientist at the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Flatiron Institute. His work spans condensed matter physics, atomic, molecular, and optical physics, statistical physics, computational physics, quantum information, and quantum computing. Profiles on: Google Scholar, ORCiD, and the arXiv.
Awards and Honors
- Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence Award Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 2022.
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics, 2021-2023.
- National Science Foundation CAREER award, “The Fate of Topology in Disordered Three-Dimensional Materials” 2020-2025.
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award, “Emulating Twistronics and Beyond with Ultra-Cold Atoms” 2020-2023.
- Nevil F. Mott Prize from SCES 2019, for “pioneering work, combining analytic and computational tools
to shed light on quantum criticality in strongly correlated heavy fermion systems and localization in topological Weyl semi-metals,” conferred in Okayama Japan, Sept 24 (2019). - H. A. Wilson Research Award, for the most outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the Physics and Astronomy department of Rice University (2014).
- Thimann Scholarship, honoring an undergraduate student showing the most promise as a future scientist, University of California Santa Cruz (2008).
Press
- Quoted in Quanta February 2024, on the status of the field of many-body localization.
- Twisting superconductors: theory in May 2023, experiment in December 2023 and January 2024, interview with STLE.
- Quoted in Quanta September 2023, on the measurement induced phase transition.
- Receiving the AFOSR YIP: The Daily Targum November, 2019.
Selected Publications
- Time-reversal symmetry breaking superconductivity between twisted cuprate superconductors, S. Y. Frank Zhao et al, Science 382, 1422 (2023).
- Current- and Field-Induced Topology in Twisted Nodal Superconductors, Pavel A. Volkov, Justin H. Wilson, Kevin P. Lucht, and J. H. Pixley Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 186001 (2023).
- Measurement and Feedback Driven Entanglement Transition in the Probabilistic Control of Chaos, Thomas Iadecola, Sriram Ganeshan, J. H. Pixley, and Justin H. Wilson Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 060403 (2023).
- Interactions and Mobility Edges: Observing the Generalized Aubry-André Model, Fangzhao Alex An et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 040603 (2021).
- Magic-angle semimetals, Yixing Fu, Elio Konig, Justin H. Wilson, Yang-Zhi Chou, Jedediah H. Pixley, npj Quantum Materials 5, 71 (2020).
- Critical properties of the measurement-induced transition in random quantum circuits, Aidan Zabalo, Michael J. Gullans, Justin H. Wilson, Sarang Gopalakrishnan, David A. Huse, J. H. Pixley, Phys. Rev. B 101, 060301(R) (2020).
- Long-range entanglement near a Kondo-destruction quantum critical point, Christopher Wagner, Tathagata Chowdhury, J. H. Pixley, Kevin Ingersent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 147602 (2018).
- Rare region induced avoided quantum criticality in disordered three-dimensional Dirac and Weyl semimetals, J. H. Pixley, David A. Huse, S. Das Sarma, Phys. Rev. X 6, 021042 (2016).
- Nearest Neighbor Tight Binding Models with an Exact Mobility Edge in One Dimension, Sriram Ganeshan, J. H. Pixley, and S. Das Sarma Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 146601 (2015).
- Kondo Destruction and Quantum Criticality in Kondo Lattice Systems, Qimiao Si, J. H. Pixley, Emilian Nica, Seiji J. Yamamoto, Pallab Goswami, Rong Yu, Stefan Kirchner, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 83 061005 (2014).