Roderich Moessner

Roderich Moessner is a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. His research interests are in condensed matter and materials physics, especially concerning new and topological forms of order, as well as the study of classical and quantum many-body dynamics in and out of equilibrium. Moessner studied physics Oxford University, where he was student of Neil Tanner's at Hertford College. At Oxford, he also received his doctorate in theoretical physics under the supervision of John Chalker. After three years as postdoc at Princeton University between 1998 and 2001, he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, where he did research at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at the École normale supérieure, Paris, until 2006. After a faculty appointment at Somerville College and Theoretical Physics at Oxford University, he joined the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden as director of the condensed matter division and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Since 2008, he is also honorary professor at TU Dresden. Moessner's research interests range widely in theoretical condensed matter physics. With Claudio Castelnovo and Shivaji L. Sondhi, Roderich Moessner is known for the theoretical proposition of realizing magnetic monopoles as emergent quasiparticles within a condensed matter system known as spin ice. Other notable results include the theoretical prediction of charge-density wave phases in quantum Hall physics, the identification and theory of a classical spin liquid on the pyrochlore lattice (both with J. T. Chalker); the theoretical discovery of the resonating valence bond liquid phase in the triangular lattice quantum dimer model (with S. L. Sondhi); and the proposal of a new type of spatiotemporal order, the πι-spin glass, now known as discrete time crystal (with V. Khemani, A. Lazarides and S. L. Sondhi), with experimental follow-up work on Google's Sycamore quantum computing platform.