Monday, November 9, 2015

Emergent quantum matter talk at IIT Kharagpur

The next two days I am visiting the Physics Department at IIT Kharagpur. My host is Arghya Taraphder. I am giving my regular talk on "Emergent quantum matter". Here is the latest versions of the slides.

I have given this talk about half a dozen times now. Yet last time I gave it I realised there was a significant typo in the formula for the Hall resistance of the Fractional quantum Hall effect. It is amazing that neither I nor anyone in my audiences caught this typo before. I am not sure what that says...


2 comments:

  1. Regarding the idea of “macroscopic quantum” phenomena mentioned in the slides, there is a nuance that I’ve found is often overlooked. Perhaps it is best to simply quote from the introductory section of an old paper [Clarke et al., Science 239, 992 (1988)]: “As Leggett (1) has emphasized, one must distinguish carefully between macroscopic quantum phenomena originating in the superposition of a large number of microscopic variables and those displayed by a single macroscopic degree of freedom.”

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  2. Thanks for the helpful comment.

    I agree that this is an important distinction. In this talk I focus on the former, e.g. a single superconducting condensate.

    The latter case is more exotic and an even more profound manifestation of quantum weirdness, e.g. interference between two superconducting condensates.

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