About

Dr. Prineha Narang is a Professor and the Howard Reiss Chair in Physical Sciences at UCLA, as well as a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her group works on theoretical and computational quantum materials, non-equilibrium dynamics, and transport in quantum matter. Prior to UCLA, she was an Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science at Harvard University, and she has also worked as a research scholar in condensed matter theory at MIT. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech. Dr. Narang's research focuses on materials and nanoscience, physical chemistry, and theory & computation. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2023 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, the 2022 Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society, and the Mildred Dresselhaus Prize. She has received prestigious fellowships and honors such as the Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Max Planck Award, and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics. She has organized symposia and workshops, served as an associate editor at ACS Nano, and held leadership roles in scientific societies. Outside of her scientific pursuits, she is an avid triathlete and runner.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Quantum mechanics
• Physics
• Materials science
• Engineering
• Nanotechnology
• Optics
• Optoelectronics
• Chemistry
• Engineering physics
• Telecommunications
• Software engineering
• Computational physics
• Crystallography
• Biochemical engineering
• Condensed matter physics
• Ecology
• Chemical physics
• Biology
• Electrical engineering
• Computational science
• Organic chemistry
• Systems engineering

Selected publications

• Programmable Photocatalysis via Symmetry-Defined Periodic Potentials

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-04-08

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Photocatalysis in atomically thin semiconductors is often limited by rapid electron-hole recombination, making it difficult to translate favorable band structures into efficient chemical function. Here we propose symmetry-defined periodic potentials as a strategy for photocatalysis: instead of modifying the chemistry of the active layer, one engineers a long-wavelength electrostatic landscape that spatially separates photoexcited electrons and holes. Applied to monolayer InSe, we show that experimentally accessible moiré patterns, such as those generated by twisted hBN, produce miniband formation, band-gap renormalization, and robust carrier separation. Using commensurate BN/InSe local registries, we further show that the moiré control layer transfers a measurable electrostatic modulation to InSe, providing the microscopic link between continuum potential engineering and the local surface environment. The key result is that the periodic potential strongly reorganizes carrier distribution while only weakly perturbing adsorption trends, thereby identifying a practically useful regime in which charge separation can be engineered without demanding major changes to the underlying surface chemistry. These results position periodic potentials as a broadly applicable design principle for photocatalysis and other light-driven interfacial phenomena in two-dimensional materials.

  PublisherDOI

• An extensive theory of nonlinearly intercoupled pseudomodes for noise model reduction in circuit QED

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-05-05

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Superconducting circuit quantum electrodynamical (cQED) platforms present a persistent modeling challenge: the intrinsic nonlinearity of the Josephson potential couples to a dissipative electromagnetic environment in ways that resist both perturbative treatment and naive Markovian reduction. Standard approaches either scale poorly with system size or absorb undeclared approximations about the noise structure into their master equations. In this work, we generalize Garraway's pseudomode construction to accommodate nonlinearly intercoupled auxiliary modes, providing a nonperturbative and systematically reducible framework for open-system cQED dynamics. The key observation is that pseudomode elimination is not fundamentally tied to linearity but to representability: any eliminated sector whose influence on the retained subsystem admits a rational self-energy can be replaced by a finite set of damped auxiliary modes, independent of the internal nonlinear structure of the retained Hamiltonian. We develop the general theory in the Heisenberg picture via a Dyson equation for the retained-mode Green's function, then demonstrate closed-form elimination for two-, three-, and four-mode Kerr-coupled systems with bilinear exchange and three-wave mixing interactions. The resulting framework substantially reduces the computational overhead of open-system cQED modeling while remaining faithful to the underlying physics, provided the spectral description of the eliminated sector is chosen to match the experimentally measured response functions of the hardware.

  PublisherDOI

• Programmable Photocatalysis via Symmetry-Defined Periodic Potentials

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-04-08

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Photocatalysis in atomically thin semiconductors is often limited by rapid electron-hole recombination, making it difficult to translate favorable band structures into efficient chemical function. Here we propose symmetry-defined periodic potentials as a strategy for photocatalysis: instead of modifying the chemistry of the active layer, one engineers a long-wavelength electrostatic landscape that spatially separates photoexcited electrons and holes. Applied to monolayer InSe, we show that experimentally accessible moiré patterns, such as those generated by twisted hBN, produce miniband formation, band-gap renormalization, and robust carrier separation. Using commensurate BN/InSe local registries, we further show that the moiré control layer transfers a measurable electrostatic modulation to InSe, providing the microscopic link between continuum potential engineering and the local surface environment. The key result is that the periodic potential strongly reorganizes carrier distribution while only weakly perturbing adsorption trends, thereby identifying a practically useful regime in which charge separation can be engineered without demanding major changes to the underlying surface chemistry. These results position periodic potentials as a broadly applicable design principle for photocatalysis and other light-driven interfacial phenomena in two-dimensional materials.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Quantum simulation via stochastic combination of unitaries

  npj Quantum Information · 2026-02-19

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Quantum simulation algorithms often require numerous ancilla qubits and deep circuits, prohibitive for near-term hardware. We introduce a framework for simulating quantum channels using ensembles of low-depth circuits in place of many-qubit dilations. This naturally enables simulations of open systems, which we demonstrate by preparing damped many-qubit GHZ states on ibm_hanoi. The technique further inspires two Hamiltonian simulation algorithms with gate counts that are asymptotically independent of the spectral precision target, reducing resource requirements by several orders of magnitude for a benchmark system.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An extensive theory of nonlinearly intercoupled pseudomodes for noise model reduction in circuit QED

  ArXiv.org · 2026-05-05

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Superconducting circuit quantum electrodynamical (cQED) platforms present a persistent modeling challenge: the intrinsic nonlinearity of the Josephson potential couples to a dissipative electromagnetic environment in ways that resist both perturbative treatment and naive Markovian reduction. Standard approaches either scale poorly with system size or absorb undeclared approximations about the noise structure into their master equations. In this work, we generalize Garraway's pseudomode construction to accommodate nonlinearly intercoupled auxiliary modes, providing a nonperturbative and systematically reducible framework for open-system cQED dynamics. The key observation is that pseudomode elimination is not fundamentally tied to linearity but to representability: any eliminated sector whose influence on the retained subsystem admits a rational self-energy can be replaced by a finite set of damped auxiliary modes, independent of the internal nonlinear structure of the retained Hamiltonian. We develop the general theory in the Heisenberg picture via a Dyson equation for the retained-mode Green's function, then demonstrate closed-form elimination for two-, three-, and four-mode Kerr-coupled systems with bilinear exchange and three-wave mixing interactions. The resulting framework substantially reduces the computational overhead of open-system cQED modeling while remaining faithful to the underlying physics, provided the spectral description of the eliminated sector is chosen to match the experimentally measured response functions of the hardware.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Bound States in Second-order Topological Graphitic Structures

  ArXiv.org · 2026-05-11

  articleOpen access

  Quadrupole insulators are a class of second-order topological insulators (SOTIs) that host zero-dimensional corner states within a two-dimensional bulk. Despite their unique properties, their realization in electronic systems on realistic material platforms remains rare. In this work, we present a general design principle to obtain quadrupole insulators based on two-dimensional graphitic structures. By engineering the positions and connections of zigzag edges, we identify four topological classes of graphitic structures. We show that topologically protected massless corner state emerge at the intersection of domains belonging to different topological classes. Crucially, by tuning the smoothness of the domain wall, we further demonstrate the appearance of additional massive localized states with non-zero angular momentum. Our results provide a practical framework for realizing experimentally accessible SOTIs and uncover the coexistence of both massless and massive bound states in two dimensions.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Bound States in Second-order Topological Graphitic Structures

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-05-11

  preprintOpen access

  Quadrupole insulators are a class of second-order topological insulators (SOTIs) that host zero-dimensional corner states within a two-dimensional bulk. Despite their unique properties, their realization in electronic systems on realistic material platforms remains rare. In this work, we present a general design principle to obtain quadrupole insulators based on two-dimensional graphitic structures. By engineering the positions and connections of zigzag edges, we identify four topological classes of graphitic structures. We show that topologically protected massless corner state emerge at the intersection of domains belonging to different topological classes. Crucially, by tuning the smoothness of the domain wall, we further demonstrate the appearance of additional massive localized states with non-zero angular momentum. Our results provide a practical framework for realizing experimentally accessible SOTIs and uncover the coexistence of both massless and massive bound states in two dimensions.

  PublisherDOI

• NMF regularization techniques for unmixing frequency comb data

  2026-03-05

  article

  We use unsupervised machine learning techniques to investigate how optical frequency combs may be used to identify molecular composition in mixed-sample environments. Optical techniques such as dual-comb heterodyne detection with GHz and THz repetition rates are often used as spectroscopic methods for probing ro-vibrational IR spectra of small molecules, proving to be promising in dispersive free-space sensing regimes. We simulate and recover an intensity spectrum from mixed-sample IR absorption in the region spanned by the comb bandwidth. We present several inexpensive, efficient machine learning methods to analyze optimal comb frequencies to maximize the ability to determine the molecular composition of a sample, based only on the interactions at those frequencies with respect to various channels of noise. Using a synthetic dataset, these methods are able to accurately identify molecules using simulated frequency combs, comparable to the ones used in practice. Furthermore, these methods withstand added noise beyond what is expected in real applications. The robustness of these methods suggests the techniques presented in this paper may be integrated into a laboratory setup and even in on-chip comb systems deployed in an atmospheric setting. This approach may be used as a detection framework for future quantum-enhanced systems via squeezed bi-photon comb inputs.

  PublisherDOI

• Navigating the Quantum Resource Landscape of Entropy Vector Space Using Machine Learning and Optimization

  Research Square · 2026-04-03

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Quantum-enhanced electric field mapping within semiconductor devices

  Physical Review Applied · 2025-06-20 · 8 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Semiconductor components based on silicon carbide (<a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mrow><a:mi>Si</a:mi><a:mi mathvariant="normal">C</a:mi></a:mrow></a:math>) are a key component for high-power electronics. Their behavior is determined by the interplay of charges and electric fields, which is typically described by modeling and simulations that are calibrated by nonlocal electric properties. So far, the 3D mapping of both the electric field and the concentrations of free charge carriers inside an electronic device remains a challenging task. To fulfill this information gap, we propose an operando method that utilizes single silicon vacancy (<d:math xmlns:d="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><d:mrow><d:msub><d:mi>V</d:mi><d:mi>Si</d:mi></d:msub></d:mrow></d:math>) centers in <f:math xmlns:f="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><f:mn>4</f:mn><f:mrow><f:mrow><f:mi mathvariant="normal">H</f:mi></f:mrow></f:mrow></f:math>-<i:math xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><i:mrow><i:mi>Si</i:mi><i:mi mathvariant="normal">C</i:mi></i:mrow></i:math>. The <l:math xmlns:l="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><l:mrow><l:msub><l:mi>V</l:mi><l:mi>Si</l:mi></l:msub></l:mrow></l:math> centers are at various positions in the intrinsic region of a -- diode. To monitor the local static electric field, we perform Stark-shift measurements based on photoluminescence excitation, which allows us to infer the expansion of the depletion zone and therefore to determine the local concentration of dopants. Besides this, we show that our measurements allow us to additionally obtain the local concentration of free charge carriers. The method presented here therefore paves the way for a new quantum-enhanced electronic device technology, capable of mapping the interplay of mobile charges and electric fields in a working semiconductor device with nanometer precision.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• RAISE-QAC-QSA: Open Quantum Systems on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices

  NSF · $400k · 2020–2023

• U.S.-Ireland R&D Partnership: Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: A unified framework for the emulation of classical and quantum physical layer networks

  NSF · $445k · 2022–2025

• Collaborative Research: Atomic-Scale Hybrids, Tuning the IR Dielectric Function through Superlattice Design

  NSF · $90k · 2019–2022

• CAREER: First Principles Design of Error-Corrected Solid-State Quantum Repeaters

  NSF · $500k · 2020–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan B. Curtis

  55 shared

• Christopher J. Ciccarino

  51 shared

• Ravishankar Sundararaman

  48 shared

• Harry A. Atwater

  California Institute of Technology

  44 shared

• Johannes Flick

  City University of New York

  41 shared

• Emiliano Cortés

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  41 shared

• Georgios Varnavides

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  39 shared

• Joachim Dahl Thomsen

  Physical Sciences (United States)

  30 shared

Awards & honors

• Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, American Physical Society
• Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award, Materials Resea…
• Mildred Dresselhaus Prize
• Bessel Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
• Max Planck Award, Max Planck Society