Blurry old pictures: Noise, memory, and the challenge of the quantum many-body problem
Prof. Joaquin Drut
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Quantum many-particle physics, broadly defined to include areas from condensed matter to QCD, can be viewed as a rich Venn diagram displaying multiple intersections. The connections arise from shared physical insight (e.g., universality in phase transitions) as well as from shared methodological approaches (e.g., Feynman diagrams). Unfortunately, these areas also share the same practical misfortunes: deep computational problems coming directly from the Schroedinger equation, which reappear in a different form in Feynman’s path-integral formalism. In this talk, I will walk you through the origin and nature of these issues, explain why they stand in the way of progress across multiple fields in physics, and outline a taxonomy of ideas to overcome them. I will then present a new and very different kind of approach to tackle the finite-temperature thermodynamics of nonrelativistic quantum systems (e.g., neutron matter and ultracold atoms). Finally, I will show you a few selected results obtained with that method which go well beyond what was thought possible only a few years ago.
All interested persons are invited to attend remotely—email physics@nd.edu for information.
Hosted by Prof. Caprio