Abhishodh Prakash

about me 

I am a member of the Physics faculty at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute. Before this, I was a Postdoc at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics in the University of Oxford working as a part of Sid Parameswaran's group and an ICTS-Simons prize postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India. I got my PhD at the C.N.Yang Institute of Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University working with Tzu-Chieh Wei. I completed my undergraduate education with a dual degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Goa campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS). 

My research interests are broadly in various aspects of quantum many-body systems- their phases and phase transitions in and out of equilibrium, topological defects and textures, fractons, thermalization or lack thereof. I am especially interested in the role played by various kinds of global symmetries and anomalies.

News and olds 

• [July 2025] My paper with Nick Jones, Ryan Thorngren and Ruben Verresen, "Charge pumps, pivot Hamiltonians and symmetry-protected topological phases" is on arXiv (2507.00995)

• [June 2025] My paper with Aryaman Babbar, Ylias Sadki and Shivaji Sondhi, "Classical Fractons: Local chaos, global broken ergodicity and an arrow of time " is published in Physical Review B.

• [May 2025] My paper with Vishnu Pulloor Kuttanikkad, Rajesh Narayanan and Titas Chanda "Two-dimensional J1-J2 clock model: A cornucopia of emergence" is on arXiv (2505.05194).

• [April 2025] I visited the Indian Institute of Science and gave a talk titled "Topological families, terminting transitions and the shape of equilibrium". 

• [April 2025] I gave a talk at the 10th Indian Statistical Physics Community Meeting titled "Classical fractons: hamiltonian attractors, non-equilibrium steady states and an arrow of time". You can watch a recording of the talk here.

• [April 2025] I visited IIT Madras and gave a talk titled "Fractons: a novel paradigm for non-equilibrium dynamics"

• [March 2025] I visited IISER Bhopal and delivered three lectures on "Charting topology of phase diagrams and field theories". I also gave a talk in their physics club titled "Group theory, soap films and broken symmetries"

• [March 2025] The Mathematica Code used in our recent preprint "Classical Fractons: Local chaos, global broken ergodicity and an arrow of time" is featured in Wolfram Community 

• [March 2025] My paper with Nick Jones and Paul Fendley, "Pivoting through the chiral-clock family" has been published in SciPost.

• [Feb 2025] My paper with Nick Jones, "Classical origins of Landau-incompatible transitions" has been accepted for publication published in Physical Review Letters.

• [Feb 2025] I gave a talk at HRI titled  "How group theory classifies phases of matter and transitions between them" as part of a new seminar series titled "Math-Physics Samgam" started at HRI with Aprameyo Pal. 

• [Feb 2025] My paper with Ylias Sadki, Shivaji Sondhi and Dan Arovas "Phase space fractons"  is on arXiv (2502.02650).

• [Jan 2025] I am co-organizing the Physics of Quantum Matter summer school at IISER Pune for PhD students on 30 June - 11 July 2025. Applications are open (deadline 28 Feb 2025)

• [Jan 2025] My paper with Aryaman Babbar, Ylias Sadki and Shivaji Sondhi, "Classical Fractons: Local chaos, global broken ergodicity and an arrow of time " is on arXiv (2501.12445). 

• [Dec 2024] I gave a talk "Classical origins of Landau-incompatible transitions" at the "Young Investigator's Meet on Quantum Condensed Matter Theory" based on based on my recent preprint with Nick Jones on the same title.

• [Nov 2024] I gave a talk titled 'Deconfined Quantum Criticality sans Quantum' at the discussion meeting 'Quantum Many-Body Physics in the age of Quantum Information'  based on my recent preprint with Nick Jones. A video recording of the talk can be found here.

• [November 2024] I have joined the faulty of Harish-Chandra Research Instutute in Allahabad!

• [Sep 2024] I gave a talk at the CT.QMAT conference in Dresden titled "Charge pumps, boundary modes and the necessity of unnecessary criticality" based on my recent paper with the same title. 

• [Sep 2024] I gave two talks at ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore: a colloquium titled "Fractons: a novel paradigm for broken ergodicity" and a seminar titled "Topological structures of 'featureless' phases: unnecessary criticality, charge pumps and boundary modes".

• [Aug 2024] My paper with Sid Parameswaran, "Charge pumps, boundary modes, and the necessity of unnecessary criticality" is up on arXiv (2408.15351).

• [Aug 2024] My paper with Jonathan Classen-Howes and Riccardo Senese, "Universal Freezing Transitions of Dipole-Conserving Chains" is up on arXiv (2408.10321). 

• [July 2024]  My paper with Ylias Sadki and Shivaji Sondhi "Machian fractons, Hamiltonian attractors and non-equilibrium steady states" is published in Physical Review B.

• [June 2024] I gave an online talk titled "Symmetry routes to novel phases of matter" at Raman Research Institute

• [June 2024] My paper with Nick Jones and Paul Fendley, "Pivoting through the chiral-clock family" is up on arXiv (2406.01680).

• [May 2024] I gave a talk "Classical origins of Landau-incompatible transitions" at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai and IIT-Madras based on a recent paper with the same title. 

• [May 2024] I gave a colloquium at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, titled "Symmetry routes to novel phases of matter"

• [May 2024] My paper with Nick Jones, "Classical origins of Landau-incompatible transitions" is up on arXiv (2404.19009).

• [Feb 2024] I gave a talk at '30 minute Theoretical Physics Tuesdays' talk at Oxford titled 'Fractons: what are they and why do we care?'.

• [Feb 2024] My paper with Shivaji Sondhi and Alain Goriely, "Classical Non-Relativistic Fractons" has been published at PRB.

• [Jan 2024] I gave a talk at IIT Kanpur titled "Machian fractons, Hamiltonian attractors and folk theorem faux-pas" 

• [Jan 2024] I gave a colloquium titled "Symmetries: who are they when they come knocking on our doors" and seminar titled "Symmetry routes to novel many-body phenomena" at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute. 

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