Condensed Matter

How does thermalization in quantum systems work? Naively, the unitary time evolution prevents thermalization, but one can easily show that in general quantum systems thermalize when brought into contact with a thermal bath. In noninteracting systems, the approach to the thermal value can be either ballistic or diffusive depending on particle statistics and bath temperature.

However, many systems cannot be thermalized when placed in a bath: glasses.

I will discuss a disorderfree model of an organic electronic glass that is formed through rapid supercooling. Geometric frustration and long-range interactions cause the Arrhenius-type freezing.

Quenched disorder can also lead to glassiness, a phenomenon known as many-body localization. In this case, thermalization is prevented by the existence of extensively many local integrals of motion. I will show how to compute these integrals of motion and their properties.

The frequency-dependent longitudinal and Hall conductivities — σ_xx and σ_xy — are dimensionless functions of ω/T in 2+1 dimensional CFTs at nonzero temperature. These functions characterize the spectrum of charged excitations of the theory and are basic experimental observables. We compute these conductivities for large N Chern-Simons theory with fermion matter. The computation is exact in the ’t Hooft coupling λ at N = ∞. We describe various physical features of the conductivity, including an explicit relation between the weight of the delta function at ω = 0 in σ_xx and the existence of infinitely many higher spin conserved currents in the theory. We also compute the conductivities perturbatively in Chern-Simons theory with scalar matter and show that the resulting functions of ω/T agree with the strong coupling fermionic result. This provides a new test of the conjectured 3d bosonization duality. In matching the Hall conductivities we resolve an outstanding puzzle by carefully treating an extra anomaly that arises in the regularization scheme used.  

When the wavefunction of a macroscopic system unitarily evolves from a low-entropy initial state, there is good circumstantial evidence it develops "branches", i.e., a decomposition into orthogonal components that can't be distinguished from the corresponding incoherent mixture by feasible observations, with each component a simultaneous eigenstate of preferred macroscopic observables.  Is this decomposition unique?  Can the number of branches decrease in time?

Answering these questions is hard because branches are defined only intuitively, much like early investigations of algorithms prior to the Church–Turing thesis.  A rigorous definition could give a speed up to certain non-stationary matrix-product state numerical simulations, as well as solve Kent's Set Selection problem in the consistent histories formalism, a 20-year-old open challenge in the foundations of quantum mechanics. I introduce some tentative definitions based on the idea of redundant information, and establishing a uniqueness theorems. A key counterexample is provided by the Shor error-correction code, which demonstrates that branch structure with robust, redundant records on macroscopic scales can hide incompatible (noncommuting) structure on microscopic scales.