The group started in the summer of 2023.
As of March 2026, the group is mostly full and new people can be accepted only as a very rare exception, especially at the PhD level. I’d be happy to talk in person or just write to poddubny@weizmann.ac.il
Current projects include
- multiple-excited subradiant states
- subradiant correlations in driven atom-photon systems
- Rydberg polaritons
- topologically nontrivial edge and bound states for interacting polaritons
Mandatory entrance exam (updated in March 2026)
I know from personal experience that I am very bad at conducting interviews. So instead, I ask anyone who is potentially interested in doing an MSc with me to take an entrance exam. This means working on a related theoretical physics problem at home and sending me the solution, which we will discuss later on. This procedure is very vaguely inspired by an old Soviet-era tradition (see https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0204295v1 ), but is intended to be much more human-friendly. Due to advances in AI, the exam will unfortunately have to include relatively involved problems, which I will still try to keep tractable. These problems will likely be related to quantum optics or undergraduate electrodynamics at the level of Jackson's course.
The minimal sufficient quantum optics background includes :
- chapters 3, 9.2 and 9.3 from the Lukin’s course on “Modern Atomic and Optical Physics II”
https://lukin.physics.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum6416/files/lukin/files/physics_285b_lecture_notes.pdf
In particular, master equation (3.85) is very important. Derivation of 3.85 might not be required, but understanding of the physics behind Eq .(3.85) is crucial.
As a self-check, you can test if you can mostly reproduce/understand Eq. (2) from the paper by
Astafiev et al., "Resonance Fluorescence of a Single Artificial Atom", Science (2010)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4944
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1181918
- Some very basic knowledge of the QuTiP package in Python, or any other way to solve the master equation for a small few-atom+photon system in simple settings numerically. The ability to use QuTiP with AI should be enough (this is my level; I can do greenfield projects in Python only with Claude Code). As a self-check, you can check if you can reproduce numerically analytical results following from Eq. 2 in the aforementioned Astafiev's (2010) paper.
In some situations, this exam could be replaced by a rotation.