This page initially incorporated my supervision experiences from the 2010s up to early 2026 and its main motivation was to ensure that I work only with highly motivated students, I enjoy such work immensely.
Since then, in mid-2026, the generative AI has taken a further leap.
The very question of what constitutes good theoretical science is under active debate; see this video by Fields Medallist Terence Tao and the corresponding preprint.
In parallel with that debate (what good theory is and what we should do, or, rather, what I should do), there is another question: whether committing to an MSc/PhD program in theoretical research or to supervising someone participating in such a program is always the right choice these days.
However, interesting hard questions and useful applications are still out there. Each time I talk to experimentalists, I find how far our models can be from actual life in the lab. I very much hope the questions of many-body subradiance I worked on so far may be well suited to that quest, since they naturally probe highly entangled states and the whole Hilbert space beyond simple descriptions.
Mandatory entrance exam (as of March 2026, might be redundant)
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.