Yuan Liu, a student in the Open Graduate Education program, will graduate this May with a doctoral degree in chemistry and a master’s in engineering. In July he will begin a postdoctoral associate position at MIT in the Center for Ultracold Atoms.

His doctoral research lies at the intersection of many-body quantum statistical mechanics, quantum chemistry, and molecular physics. He developed theoretical tools to study quantum many-body systems at finite temperature from first principles.

“I would say the most exciting thing about my research is how one is able to model the behaviors of electrons to such a great extent using pencil, paper and computers, and then forget all the details and simply try to ‘understand’ the physics behind it,” says Liu.

He credits the Open Graduate program for giving him a broad interdisciplinary perspective among electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry, and prepared him to pursue related ideas in his future career.

“I think the reviewers of my job application valued my idea of combining quantum information science and chemistry, the two subjects that I pursued during my participation in the Open Grad program,” says Liu.

Using analytical and numerical tools, he also studies light-matter interaction, nonadiabatic couplings, and threshold effects in dipole- and quadrupole-bound electronic states in cold molecular anions. His other research contributions include designing noise models for anomalous heating in ion traps, which is one of the leading technologies for quantum computing. 

“They are not trivial tasks; Electrons interact with each other, and you will be surprised by how complicated their behaviors can be depending on where they are, such as in atoms, molecules, or even solid-state materials,” says Liu.

Yuan Liu is from Xianyang, China and completed his undergraduate education at Tsinghua University in Beijing, majoring in Physics.