Physics and Astronomy Colloquium – Dr. Fiona Burnell

About the event

The Department of Physics and Astronomy invites you to a colloquium featuring Dr. Fiona Burnell, University of Minnesota. Dr. Burnell will present her talk, “Exact models of many-body quantum scars”, Thursday, April 1 at 4:10 pm via Zoom.

Meet the speaker at 3:30 pm – join us in welcoming the speaker and for an informal chat!

https://wsu.zoom.us/j/95710823436?pwd=QlJTZzN6a25DTnJsUG44aW0vNWtzZz09
Meeting ID: 957 1082 3436
Passcode: PhysAstro

Abstract: There are a few well-known ways for quantum mechanical, many-body systems to avoid coming to thermal equilibrium. For example, we know of two classes of systems — integrable systems, and many-body localized systems — for which conservation laws prevent any eigenstate from reaching (conventional) thermal equilibrium. More recently, a much more subtle type of non-thermal quantum phenomenon has been discovered, dubbed many-body quantum scars. In these systems, a small number of eigenstates (and hence a small number of initial conditions) have non-thermal behavior, while most initial states will approach thermal equilibrium in the usual way. I will give a general picture of how and when this phenomenon arises, and discuss several examples of systems exhibiting exact quantum many-body scars.