Guanghui He: Probing Many-Body Physics with Solid-State Spins

Date: Wednesday, October 29th, 2025

Location: Elings Hall, room 1601

Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Probing Many-Body Physics with Solid-State Spins

Abstract: Emergent phenomena in interacting quantum systems arise from collective behavior beyond single-particle physics. In this talk, I will show how solid-state spin defects, including nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond and negatively charged boron vacancy centers in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), enable the simulation and probing of many-body physics within and beyond the spin ensemble. In the first part, I engineer a strongly interacting NV ensemble under quasi-Floquet drive to access a long-lived prethermal regime and realize a discrete-time quasicrystalline phase. In the second part, I develop a two-dimensional quantum sensor in hBN operable inside a diamond anvil cell to image stress and magnetism simultaneously at gigapascal pressures, resolving a pressure-induced magnetic phase transition in a CrTe/hBN heterostructure. These results demonstrate that solid-state spins provide a versatile platform for studying many-body physics.

Bio: Guanghui He is an experimentalist in Prof. Chong Zu's group at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests lie in the applications of solid-state spin defects. During his PhD, he investigated non-equilibrium dynamics using an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, and developed novel two-dimensional sensors for operation under extreme conditions.