Xiao-Gang Wen

Xiao-Gang Wen is Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wen’s main research area is condensed matter theory. He introduced the notion of topological order and quantum order to describe a new class of matter states. This opens up a new research direction in condensed matter physics. He found that states with topological order contain non-trivial boundary excitations and developed chiral Luttinger theory for the boundary states. The boundary states can become ideal conduction channel which may leads to device application of topological phases. He also proposed a special class of topological order: non-Abelian quantum Hall states. They contain emergent particles with non-Abelian statistics which generalizes the well-known Bose and Fermi statistics.

Wen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton.