Date/Time
Date(s) - 15/02/2006
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: Incompressible Quantum Liquids And New Conservation Laws

Speaker: Dr. Alexander Seidel

Institute: University of Berkeley, California
Department of Physics

Location: ABB 102

Description:

In recent years, physicists have searched concertedly for new quantum states of matter. A central focus of this search has been the study of a class of materials known as Mott insulators. These materials are prime examples of systems where electronic interactions play a defining role. Many researchers in the field share the hope that the study of Mott insulators will lead to a new paradigm for strong correlation effects, which may provide a route to understand phenomena such as high temperature superconductivity. This paradigm may be organized around a new state of matter which is a “featureless Mott insulator”, i.e. a Mott insulator that has no spontaneous symmetry breaking. However, the past two decades have proven the search for such states to be difficult, both in theory and experiment. So far only few model Hamiltonians exist that support the possibility of featureless Mott insulators. In this talk, I will discuss a new approach to tackle the difficulties in constructing these models. This approach is based on an unusual conservation law, which is the conservation of the center-of-mass position in many-body physics.