Kai Sun

Professor Sun works in the general area of many-body physics. His research covers a wide-range of topics including condensed matter physics and ultra-cold atomic gases. The main research efforts in his studies focus on the search for novel states of matter and providing theoretical understanding of their exotic properties. His recent work includes fractional topological states in topological flatbands, interaction induced topological insulators, topological Kondo insulators and holographic elasticity. He has also studied various non-Fermi liquids in strongly correlated fermionic systems, focusing on the quantum liquid crystal phases, and frustrated magnetism.

Select Publications

Surface Phonons, Elastic Response, and Conformal Invariance in Twisted Kagome Lattices, (Kai Sun, Anton Souslov, Xiaoming Mao, and T. C. Lubensky), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 12369-12374 (2012).

Topological Semimetal in a Fermionic Optical Lattice, (Kai Sun, W. Vincent Liu, Andreas Hemmerich, and S. Das Sarma), Nature Physics 8, 67 (2012).

Fractional Quantum Hall Effect in the Absence of Landau Levels, (D. N. Sheng, Zheng-Cheng Gu, Kai Sun, and L. Sheng), Nature Communications 2, 389 (2011).

Nearly Flatbands with Nontrivial Topology, (Kai Sun, Zhengcheng Gu, Hosho Katsura, and S. Das Sarma), Physical Review Letters 106, 236803 (2011).

Topological Kondo Insulators, (Maxim Dzero, Kai Sun, Victor Galitski, and Piers Coleman), Physical Review Letters 104, 106408 (2010).

Topological Insulators and Nematic Phases from Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in 2d Fermi Systems with a Quadratic Band Crossing, (Kai Sun, Hong Yao, Eduardo Fradkin, and Steven A. Kivelson), Physical Review Letters 103, 046811 (2009).

Field(s) of Study

• Condensed Matter Physics Theory