General Physics Colloquium and Henley Lecture, Professor Vedika Khemani, Stanford University

CANCELLED

Title:  Quantum Matter Out of Equilibrium

Host:  Chao-Ming Jian

Abstract:  A central goal of condensed matter physics is to study the universal emergent properties of macroscopic quantum systems with large numbers of interacting particles. Due to a variety of conceptual and experimentally motivated reasons, the traditional approach of many-body physics is largely built around the study of low-temperature and near-equilibrium properties of time independent Hamiltonians. A confluence of developments across a range of subfields --- particularly experimental advances in building programmable quantum devices --- have opened up a vast new territory of studying many-body phenomena in completely novel regimes: highly excited, "post Hamiltonian", and far from equilibrium. The natural evolutions implemented by these novel experiments are out-of-equilibrium dynamics generated by quantum circuits of unitary gates, possibly interrupted by measurements, and starting from initial states that are not low energy in any useful sense. I will describe some highlights of an active research program to advance many-body theory beyond the regime of near-equilibrium time-independent Hamiltonians, with a view towards uncovering novel emergent phenomena in the non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems, and the physics of quantum circuits.