Rate My Professor Joachim Brand

Professor Joachim Brand is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Massey University’s New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study, Albany Campus, where he leads the Coherent Quantum Gases group within the Centre for Theoretical Chemistry and Physics. He earned his Diploma in Physics in 1995 and Doctor of Science in 1999 from Heidelberg University. Since 2012, Brand has held the position of Professor at Massey University, serving as Principal Investigator for research on ultracold atomic gases. He joined the Dodd-Walls Centre in 2015 and acts as a doctoral supervisor, having guided six PhD completions as main supervisor, including Sarthak Choudhury in 2023 and Mingrui Yang in 2022, and currently supervises three PhD students on topics such as dynamics of analogue quantum simulators and quantum phases in fermionic systems. Brand is Vice-President of the New Zealand Institute of Physics and project leader on multiple funded initiatives, including Marsden Fund projects like Unraveling hidden order in ultracold matter: The case of Odd-Frequency Superfluidity (2026-2029), Te Whai Ao - Dodd-Walls Centre Investigator Tranche 2 (2025-2028), and QCE4: Topological materials and coupled superfluids (2021-2027).

Brand’s research specializes in quantum physics, condensed matter physics, computational physics, nonlinear waves, and complex systems, with a focus on nonlinear wave phenomena such as solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates, strong correlations in Bose and Fermi quantum gases, superfluidity, and quantum simulations. His group develops software tools like Rimu.jl for quantum many-body systems and QiwiB for multi-configurational time-dependent Hartree for bosons. Key publications include Backert et al., 'Effective Theory for Strongly Attractive One-Dimensional Fermions' (Physical Review Letters, 2025); Major and Brand, 'Swallow-tail dispersions of moving solitons in a two-dimensional fermionic superfluid' (Physical Review A, 2024); Choudhury and Brand, 'Distributed vorticity model for vortex molecule dynamics' (Physical Review A, 2023); and earlier seminal works such as Muñoz Mateo and Brand, 'Chladni solitons and the onset of the snaking instability for dark solitons in confined superfluids' (Physical Review Letters, 2014) and Brand et al. on soliton-vortex collisions (Physical Review Letters, 2005). His research has over 3,300 citations across 136 publications. Brand has delivered public lectures, including on gravitational waves and the sounds of the universe.