When:
Thursday, March 3, 2016
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT
Where: Technological Institute, F160, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Pamela Villalovoz
(847) 491-3644
Group: Physics and Astronomy Condensed Matter Physics Seminars
Category: Academic
Title: Shaking up statistical physics in interacting quantum systems
Speaker: Dr. Anushya Chandran, Perimeter Institute
Abstract: Statistical mechanics is a central pillar of modern physics with applications across the sciences. At its core is the idea of thermal equilibrium, which allows for a simple description of an interacting quantum system in terms of a few properties like temperature, without keeping track of the entire wavefunction. But what if a quantum system fails to equilibrate? In this talk, I will discuss how we are discovering the answer to this question theoretically and experimentally. I’ll focus on two settings: disordered systems and periodically driven systems. In the former, many-body localization can prevent thermalization even at very high energy densities. The transition between the localized and the thermal phase is a fascinating dynamical quantum transition about which little is known. I will derive a rigorous constraint on this transition and apply it to current numerical studies and cold atomic experiments. Clean periodically driven systems, on the other hand, generically absorb energy indefinitely. I will present one physical setting of interacting bosons in which this expectation fails.
Speaker Schedule
Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, CMP