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 exam is loosely inspired by an old Landau school tradition (see https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0204295 ), but is intended to be much more friendly and humane. Due to advances in AI, the exam might include relatively involved problems, which I will still try to keep quite tractable. These problems will be related to quantum optics or undergraduate electrodynamics at the level of Jackson's course or at the level of my " Collective light-matter interactction" minicourse, see here the curriculum https://www.weizmann.ac.il/complex/poddubny/lecture-notes-developed-and-developing-courses.
I am not going to require any minimal grades or any completed courses, it is just sufficient to have a minimal quantum optics background. This 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, understanding the physics behind master equation (3.85) is important.
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.