Subir Sachdev

Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, and received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics from 2017-2019.

Sachdev developed the theory of magneto-thermoelectric transport in 'strange' metals: these are states of quantum matter with variable density without quasiparticle excitations. Such metals are found, most famously, near optimal doping in the hole-doped cuprates, but also appear in numerous other correlated electron compounds. For strange metals in which momentum is approximately conserved, a set of hydrodynamic equations were proposed in 2007, describing two-component transport with momentum drag component and a quantum-critical conductivity. This formulation was connected to the holography of charged black holes, memory functions, and new field-theoretic approaches. These equations are valid when the electron-electron scattering time is much shorter than the electron-impurity scattering time, and they lead to specific predictions for the density, disorder, temperature, frequency, and magnetic field dependence of transport properties. Strange metal behavior obeying these hydrodynamic equations was predicted in graphene, in the 'quantum critical' regime of weak disorder and moderate temperatures near the Dirac density. The theory quantitatively describes measurements of thermal and electrical transport in graphene, and points to a regime of viscous, rather than Ohmic, electron flow. Extensions of this theory to Weyl metals pointed out the relevance of the axial-gravitational anomaly, and made predictions for thermal transport which were confirmed in observations (and highlighted in the New York Times).

Sachdev attended school at St. Joseph's Boys' High School, Bangalore and Kendriya Vidyalaya, ASC, Bangalore. He attended college at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi for a year. He transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a B.S. in Physics. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard University. He held professional positions at Bell Labs (1985–1987) and at Yale University (1987–2005), where he was a Professor of Physics, before returning to Harvard, where he is now the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics. He has also held visiting positions as the Cenovus Energy James Clerk Maxwell Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the Dr. Homi J. Bhabha Chair Professorship at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He has also been on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2018.