Date/Time
Date(s) - 27/01/2010
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: Perfect Fluidity: From Quark-Gluon Plasmas to Ultra-Cold Fermi Gases

Speaker: Dr. Ed Taylor – Ohio State University

Institute:

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Recently, there have been tremendous interest in the viscosity of quantum fluids where the interactions between particles are very strong. In such liquids, the specific viscosity, which measures the rate at which disturbances in the fluid are damped out, can be very small. The study of the ultra low-viscosity (“perfect”) fluids has brought together diverse areas of physics–black holes and string theory, quark-gluon plasmas, quantum fluids and cold atoms–which, at first sight, appear to have little in common. There is now a considerable effort devoted to understanding the common properties of these perfect fluids and to answering the question of whether there is a fundamental lower bound on the specific viscosity. In this talk, I will review some of the remarkable experimental and theoretical developments in this field. I will also present new results for the viscosity spectral functions in dilute gases of neutral Fermi atoms with large s-wave scattering lengths, and discuss our proposal for a spectroscopic measurement of the shear viscosity.