As the initial excitement of opening night transitioned into deep scientific exchange, the second day of QMAT2026 made one thing abundantly clear: the landscape of quantum physics is shifting rapidly, and Indian institutions are driving the conversation. This year’s summit at the JNU Convention Center is backed by a landmark partnership with Bennett University—a collaboration that highlights a growing commitment within India’s higher education sector to anchor high-impact global research and foster a new generation of physicists.
For Bennett University, the partnership represents more than just institutional branding. It marks a deliberate push to integrate private academia with the country’s most sophisticated scientific networks. By co-hosting an event featuring over 80 specialized sessions and a massive contingent of young scholars, the university is actively helping bridge the gap between foundational theoretical physics and emerging technological applications.
The morning began with a packed plenary hall for a review lecture by Prof. Pratap Raychaudhuri of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. A recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, Raychaudhuri is widely respected for his experimental work on how materials behave when pushed to the absolute limits of cold and disorder.
Raychaudhuri’s presentation focused on the intricate interplay of classical and quantum forces acting on vortex lattices in superconducting thin films. In superconductors, magnetic fields penetrate the material in tiny, quantized tubes of flux called vortices. Understanding how these vortices move, arrange themselves, and interact under different conditions is not just an academic exercise; it is fundamental to the global effort to engineer robust, loss-free quantum materials and superconducting circuits.
Dr. Raka Dasgupta from the University of Calcutta addressed a persistent headache in quantum computing: dissipation. Traditionally, interacting with the environment causes a quantum system to lose its delicate state, a process known as decoherence. However, Dasgupta showed that by using strong “Rydberg blockade” interactions—where an excited atom prevents its neighbors from doing the same—researchers can actually use dissipation to drive the system into a stable, ordered antiferromagnetic phase. By mapping these open systems onto effective non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, her team has found a way to simplify the math while still capturing the precise spectral paths these systems take.
Sanyal presented a pipeline that uses convolutional autoencoders to look directly at simple, real-space density images—essentially snapshot photographs of ultracold atoms. The AI successfully identified complex localization transitions and mobility edges across multiple theoretical models without any prior labeling. Because the model remains highly robust against real-world imaging noise and can scale from small simulations to massive experimental setups, it offers a highly practical tool for labs trying to read the outputs of modern quantum simulators.
The energy of the summit shifted gears in the afternoon during the poster session, where nearly 130 students and postdocs from across India displayed their latest research. This segment highlighted the core ethos behind Bennett University’s involvement. By creating a space where undergraduate and doctoral students could directly debate their findings with institutional peers and senior scientists, the partnership effectively democratized access to the highest levels of contemporary physics.
The day ended on an extraordinary intellectual note with a colloquium by Prof. Subir Sachdev, the Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Sachdev, whose textbook Quantum Phase Transitions remains a staple in graduate education worldwide, delivered a sweeping talk that connected the physics of the incredibly small with the physics of the unimaginably massive.
Sachdev tackled the decades-old mystery of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates (copper-oxide compounds). He argued that understanding these strongly correlated materials requires a conceptual leap outside traditional condensed matter frameworks. In a stunning display of theoretical synthesis, he demonstrated how the mathematical tools used to describe the quantum theory of black holes—specifically holographic duality and string theory—mirror the exact equations needed to understand electron entanglement in cuprates. Furthermore, he linked these patterns to the underlying principles of quantum error correction, suggesting that nature may be using the same codes to stabilize information in a lab sample as it does at the event horizon of a black hole.
As QMAT2026 moves into its final days, the partnership between premier research bodies, global minds like Sachdev, and forward-looking institutions like Bennett University is proving that India is no longer just observing the quantum frontier—it is actively drawing the map.
Source: Times Now
