Charlotte Fløe Kristjansen receives Villum Investigator Grant

Professor Charlotte Fløe Kristjansen, currently the Deputy Head of Institute for Research at Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) has been awarded a Villum Investigator grant of 20Mkr from the Villum Foundation to explore how quantum systems react to sudden disturbances with a research program entitled “Quantum Quenches from Quantum Fields.” With earlier support form a DFF Sapere Aude Top Researcher grant Charlotte Fløe Kristjansen has built a research group which works at the interface of theoretical high energy physics, condensed matter physics and quantum information theory.

The Villum Investigator research program will start in the Fall of 2025 and run for six years.

Charlotte Fløe Kristjansen got her PhD from NBI and afterwards held postdoc positions at IPhT Saclay, Nordita and NBI where she became an Associate Prof. in 2006 and a Professor in 2011. She had long-term visiting positions at Tokyo Institute of Technology and at the Max Planck Institute for gravitational physics in Potsdam.  Charlotte’s research expertise lies within exact solutions to problems in quantum field theory and string theory. Most recently, she has  been working on defect conformal field theories with holographic duals. It is methods developed within this framework by Charlotte and her group which will now be applied in a completely different setting with the Villum Investigator research program. Other areas where Charlotte Fløe Kristjansen has made particularly important contributions are within integrability in the AdS/CFT correspondence, spin chains and graphene. Furthermore, early in her career she worked on discrete models of quantum gravity and on random matrices, and several of her works from that era are classics in the field today. Charlotte Fløe Kristjansen has been a member of the national research council DFF-FNU for six years and was elected a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2012. She is a board member of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA).