Physics X Network
The physics of networks, or the network of physics?
This rhetorical question captures the interdisciplinary essence of our research group's mission — to explore the rich interplay between network science and both statistical and quantum physics.
Led by Professor Xiangyi "X" Meng, the group's research spans several areas:
- Quantum networks, communications, and computing; quantum complex systems.
- Physical/biological networks (and their connections to string theory).
- Statistical physics of complex networks, network metrics.
- Open quantum systems, open quantum field theories.
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[Mar, 2025] Our paper "Unveiling the importance of nonshortest paths in quantum networks" is published in Science Advances (doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adt2404). Congratulations to Xinqi and Gaogao!
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[Jan, 2025] Our paper "Path Percolation in Quantum Communication Networks" is featured in phys.org: Physicists propose 'bridge' strategy to stabilize quantum networks
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[Jan, 2025] Our paper "Path Percolation in Quantum Communication Networks" is published in Physical Review Letters. I am grateful for the contributions of my former lab collaborator, Bingjie, my advisor, István, and Balázs, whose mathematical expertise was essential.
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[Jan, 2025] It was pleasant to present our work "Multipartite entanglement routing as a hypergraph immersion problem" at Dynamics Days US 2025.
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[Dec, 2024] Happy to attend the 127th Statistical Mechanics Conference at Rutgers University (probably the oldest conference I've attended...). I gave a short talk about "path percolation", an interesting statistical model that is related to both quantum communication networks and physical networks!
Prof. Xiangyi "X" Meng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He earned his B.S. in microelectronics from Peking University and completed his Ph.D. in physics at Boston University (advised by Prof. Eugene Stanley). Prior to his role at RPI, he worked with Prof. Albert-László Barabási as a Postdoc at Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research, and with Prof. István Kovács as a Research Associate at Northwestern University.
Prof. Meng's research spans several areas of physics and network science, including quantum networks and quantum information, open quantum field theories, science of science, computational social science, physical and biological networks, scale-free network theories, information diffusion, tensor networks, and recurrent neural networks. He also applies interdisciplinary network science approaches to explore brains and econophysics.
Prof. Meng has published 20+ publications in prestigious journals such as Physical Review Letters, PNAS, PNAS Nexus, Science Advances, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, Communications Physics, Chaos Solitons & Fractals, Physical Review D, Physical Review Research, among others. He has reviewed 50+ papers from the above journals and Europhysics Letters, New Journal of Physics, Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Journal of Business Research, etc. His work has been highlighted in Physics World, Phys.org, among other media outlets.