Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
30
2015

Mikhail Shifman: How Far We Have Advanced from the Abrikosov Vortices

When: Friday, October 30, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

Where: Technological Institute, L211, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public

Contact: Pamela Villalovoz   13645

Group: Physics and Astronomy Colloquia

Category: Academic

Description:

Title: How Far We Have Advanced from the Abrikosov Vortices

Speaker: Mikhail Shifman, University of Minnesota

Abstract:

In the early 1950s in one of his student works Alexei Abrikosov predicted superconductors of the second kind and demonstrated that external magnetic fields should generate vortices (magnetic flux tubes) in the bulk of the superconducting sample. This was the first example of topological solitons in quantum field theory which earned him the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1984 Edvard Witten suggested cosmic strings behaving like superconducting wires whose passage through astrophysical magnetic fields could generate a variety of striking effects. This subject continues to attract attention thirty years later. In the mid-1970s Yoichiro Nambu, Gerard ’t Hooft and Stanley Mandelstam conjectured that the dual Meissner effect and formation of the chromoelectric vortex lines were responsible for quark (color) confinement at strong coupling, a mysterious phenomenon observed in nature. 

The second coming of the topological vortex strings occurred with the advancement of supersymmetry. In 1994, Nathan Seiberg and Witten analytically proved, for the first time ever, the dual Meissner effect in a supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with parallels in QCD. This was a breakthrough of remarkable proportions. In 2003 the so-called non-Abelian vortex flux tubes were constructed, also in a supersymmetric setting. Currently there is a large number of applications of non-Abelian flux tubes (strings), both in high-energy theory and in condensed matter physics. I review various aspects of this topic in non-technical terms.

Host: Kam Seth

Speaker Schedule

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium

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