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Scale/Conformal Symmetries in Ultra Cold Quantum Gases: Surprises and Excitement


Speaker:Prof. Fei Zhou
Affiliation:University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Date:June 22, 2018 (Friday)
Time:4:00 p.m.
Venue:Room 522, 5/F, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building, HKU

Abstract
 

Strongly interacting systems have been puzzling to physicists for many decades and some of them remain to be extremely challenging despite of powerful computation resources available. Most celebrated ones include the proton mass problem in QCD, superconductivity and pseudo gap physics in high temperature superconducting materials. Relatively recently added to this list are unitary quantum gases that AMO physicists have been studying in many labs.

In this talk, I will discuss the energetics and non-equilibrium phenomena in a few strongly interacting ultra cold quantum gases, some of which have been long standing problems in quantum statistical mechanics and are pretty mysterious. And how one can gain unique insight into these problems by simply utilizing the scale/conformal (non-relativistic version) symmetries in these problems. I will also share a few surprises and new progress recently made on 2d systems where superficial scale symmetries are dynamically broken resulting in dilatonic particles, instability etc..

Coffee and tea will be served 20 minutes prior to the seminar.

Anyone interested is welcome to attend.