Andrei Bernevig took part in the Physics Olympiad in Bucharest from 1994 to 1997 as a teenager (and won international gold and silver medals). He graduated from Stanford University (bachelor’s degree in physics and master’s degree in mathematics in 2001) and received his PhD from Stanford University under Shoucheng Zhang. As a postdoctoral fellow he came to the Center for Theoretical Physics at Princeton University, where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 2009 and tanured in 2014.
Bernevig is a leading expert in theoretical condensed matter physics, especially topological phases of matter. His pioneering work has made fundamental contributions to the theory of topological materials—including topological insulators, topological semimetals and topological superconductors—as well as to the understanding of the fractional quantum Hall effect and high-temperature superconductivity.
In 2016 he received the New Horizons in Physics Prize. In 2014 he received the Sackler Prize. In 2017 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 2018, an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. In 2019 he was awarded the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials from the American Physical Society. He was awarded the 2023 EPS Europhysics Prize jointly with Claudia Felser for their contributions “in the classification, prediction, and discovery of novel topological quantum materials.”
IFT Colloquium
November 12, 2025
4:05 PM in 1002 NPB
The rise of moire systems
We will review the beginning of experimental and theoretical studies of moire systems and their evolution up to present. This type of systems represent a new way of “growing” materials, and has tremendous potential both for fundamental physics as well as for applications. Two dimensional periodic crystals, whose separation between atoms is of order angstroms, can be twisted controllably with respect to each other such that they form new “periodicities”, called moire periodicities. In the new “unit cell” we find thousands of atoms of the original crystal. These atoms behave in ways that are incredibly counterintuitive. We show how the controlled twisting of graphene and MoTe2 layers has led to a slew of states of matter not possible in bulk conventional materials. We will show how the collective behavior of thousands of p orbitals in a moire unit cell of graphene can create single Heavy fermion at moire scale, and how the interaction between such fermions can lead to a perfect quantum simulator of an Anderson model. We will then present a catalogue of possible twistable materials and show how a huge variety of strongly interacting models can be realized in twisted homo and hetero twisted bilayers and multilayers of these materials.