What first attracted you to the field of physics?
I fell in love with maths and theoretical physics at sixth form. I liked the idea that you could arrive at fundamental truths using just a pen and paper and by thinking very hard. I liked the process of proving things: starting with a vague intuition, and refining it into a crisp and controlled argument.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about physics?
Outsiders sometimes think physicists are all a bit like Spock, and that doing physics simply requires dispassionate linear thinking. It's true that being able to think systematically is important, but outsiders don't appreciate that the best physics/maths is often the result of an intuitive leap, and the willingness to spend a lot of time playing with ideas and engaging the imagination.
What's an exciting project that you're working on at the moment?
Schools still seem to teach that there are three phases of matter (liquid, solid, gas). But this isn't correct, there are many more examples of phases, and some of them are very weird. For example, if you make some metals very cold they enter a so-called superconducting phase: the material is still solid, but its electrical resistance suddenly vanishes once the temperature drops below a critical value. The effect is intrinsically quantum mechanical -- it relies on the fact that electrons in the metal move according to the rules of quantum mechanics.
I (and others) have an ongoing interest in extending our list of phases. Right now, I'm interested in exploring phases in so-called driven-dissipative systems. These are systems that are simultaneously subjected to driving (e.g., zapping with radiation), cooling and measurement. It seems that phases do exist in this setting, and we've identified some. We're hoping to discover some new phases with interesting, robust and intrinsically quantum mechanical properties.
What are you most proud of in your career to date?
Parts of my work are not immediately connected to experiments or practical applications--I work on them because they're interesting and advance our theoretical understanding. The hope is that the resulting improved theoretical understanding will eventually pay off and deliver a useful application or interesting experiment in the longer term. This approach has paid off more than once for me, so I'm proud that I've been a little stubborn in working on these more theoretical things.
The most recent example of this has come from trying to apply ideas in quantum information theory to condensed matter physics. Some of my earlier work on this topic was very abstract, and it all initially seemed a bit self-indulgent. However, the work eventually led me to develop a useful computational tool for predicting the properties of some materials and experiments.