Pranshoo Updhyay receives two poster awards for his experimental work.
February 24, 2026
Pranshoo Upadhyay’s work involves fabricating moire heterostructure devices and building spatial-and time-resolved measurement setups to study exciton dynamics under cryogenic conditions.
Hafezi Group member Pranshoo Upadhyay has won two poster awards at prestigious conferences for his work on utilising light in condensed matter physics: one at the SELEQ 2024 Conference in Donostia, Spain, and at the PQI 2025 Workshop - Scalable Analog Quantum Simulation Using Moire Superlattices in Pittsburgh, PA.
Working within a Bose-Fermi Hubbard system, Pranshoo focuses on using light as a gentle probe to create a strong optical drive accessing non-equilibrium states, and to modify the microscopic Hamiltonian of the system itself. In recent experiments, Pranshoo and the team discovered that in close proximity to the Mott insulator, exciton diffusion is enhanced by orders of magnitude rather than suppressed. This work revealed a rich evolution of the exciton’s character within the surrounding fermionic environment, including the first evidence of a non-monogamous electron–hole pairing mechanism. With a sensitive dynamical probe and active tunability of Bose–Fermi distributions, Pranshoo’s work opens new pathways toward quantum simulation in moiré systems.
To learn more, check out Pranshoo’s latest publication “Giant enhancement of exciton diffusion near an electronic Mott insulator,” published in Science volume 391, issue 6783 (Jan 2026).