Physics Department Colloquia |
Events During the Week of March 27th through April 3rd, 2022
Monday, March 28th, 2022
- No events scheduled
Tuesday, March 29th, 2022
- No events scheduled
Wednesday, March 30th, 2022
- No events scheduled
Thursday, March 31st, 2022
- No events scheduled
Friday, April 1st, 2022
- Exploring anyons and black holes-like dynamics in flatland
- Time: 3:30 pm
- Place: 2103 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Smitha Vishveshwara, UIUC
- Abstract: The world and the Universe we live in are composed of fermions and bosons. The quantum statistics of these particles overwhelmingly governs what we see around us. But one could wonder, can other kinds of quantum particles exist? I will begin this colloquium with an introduction of quantum statistics and the fascinating possible existence of anyons, particles which obey 'fractional' statistics. The quantum Hall system forms a marvelous two-dimensional realm for hosting many rich phenomena, including fractional statistics. I will describe how anyons can emerge in this setting, how they could be detected borrowing from beam-splitter and other principles used to detect bosons and fermions, and how recent landmark experiments did perform such detection. I will also illustrate how the same setting can probe dynamics akin to that found in the astrophysical realm of black holes. Specifically, point-contact geometries can exhibit phenomena parallel to Hawking-Unruh radiation and black hole quasinormal modes associated with ringdowns in gravitational wave detection.
- Host: Alex Levchenko