Time: 15:00-16:30, Sep. 2 (Mon.), 2019

Venue: Rm. 234, IOP M Building, Institute of Physics, CAS

Speaker: Jan Zaanen  

Instituut-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics, Leiden University

About the speaker

* Distinguished Prof. of theor. phys. at the Lorentz inst for theor Phys, Leiden Univ.

* Recipient of the Dutch Spinoza Award

* Mem of the Dutch Royal Acad. of Sci.

* Fellow of APS and the Newton Center at Cambridge Univ.

* The Solvay Prof. chair at the Solvay inst.

Abstract

The simple message of eigenstate thermalization is that what we think is the random motions of classical things producing heat is a delusion caused by our incapacity to keep track of the flow of quantum information in the enormous many-body Hilbert space. Are there circumstances where it is impossible to construct such a consistent classical analogy? Helped by holography we accidentally discovered recently a number of cases.  Even in the elementary physics of expanding cold atom clouds a vivid example has been identified (arXiv:1703.02489).  Planckian dissipation is in this regard a no-brainer but its ultimate consequence for experiment turns out to be stunningly weird.  Finally, the holographic modelling of optical pump-probe experiments predicts that strange metals should invariably exhibit the phenomenon of instantaneous thermalization. I will argue that this suggests a critical test of the UV independence notion by mobilizing condensed matter experiment (arXiv:1708.08279).