Mohammad Hafezi

Mohammad Hafezi is a physicist and the Minta Martin Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a joint institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Early life and education As a student, Hafezi won a silver medal at the 29th International Physics Olympiad, held in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1998. He studied for two years at Sharif University of Technology before completing his undergraduate degree in physics at the École Polytechnique in France in 2003. He was promoted to full professor with tenure in 2021 and holds the Minta Martin professorship. Because neutral atoms do not couple directly to a magnetic field, such proposals required synthesizing an effective (artificial) gauge field to reproduce the physics of charged particles in a magnetic field. Following this work on neutral atoms, Hafezi turned to exploring topological physics for other neutral particles—in particular photons—which similarly do not experience a magnetic field directly.

In 2011, Hafezi and collaborators proposed that photons in arrays of coupled optical ring resonators could exhibit topologically protected edge transport, providing robustness against fabrication disorder. His team subsequently demonstrated topological edge states of light on a silicon chip and the first direct measurement of topological invariants in a photonic system.

His group extended these ideas to quantum light, demonstrating a topological source of quantum light based on correlated photon pairs and, with collaborators, a topological interface for quantum emitters. In 2024, his group reported the observation of topological frequency combs in nested photonic resonator arrays.

His research group also studies the use of quantum-optical techniques to probe and control correlated electron systems.

Honors and awards 1998 – Silver medal, 29th International Physics Olympiad (Reykjavík, Iceland) 2015 – Young Investigator Program award, Office of Naval Research 2020 – Simons Investigator in Physics, Simons Foundation 2021 – Fellow of the American Physical Society, "For pioneering theoretical and experimental work in topological photonics and quantum synthetic matter." 2025 – Humboldt Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation