Scientific Series

In describing condensed matter, some well established paradigms have allowed much progress to be made in understanding and using materials.  But in the last 15 - 20 years, new materials, such as heavy fermions, high temperature superconductors, and now charge density wave-supporting materials,  have been shown to require new paradigms in describing them.  While much progress has been achieved in that time, we still do not have  a widely accepted theoretical description of the nature of their electronic excitations.

Fractional quantum Hall effect in the sequence of filling factors n/(2np +- 1) is well understood by the integer quantum Hall effect of the composite fermions at the filling factor n. A composite fermion (CF) is a bound state of an electron and 2p number of quantized vortices. However, the experimentally observed states such as 4/11, 5/13, and 3/8 which are between 1/3 and 2/5 cannot be accommodated in the conventional noninteracting theory of composite fermions. The interaction between CFs in partially filled second effective Landau levels of CFs is important for these states. However, conventional fractional quantum Hall effect of these interacting composite fermions do not reproduce these incompressible states. By diagonalizing Coulomb Hamiltonian in a restricted Hilbert space of the CFs, we find that these states are incompressible for flux-particle relationships that are different from the conventional considerations. We interpret that 4/11 and 5/13 states occur due to fractional quamtum Hall effect of the composite fermions for Haldane Pseudopotential V_3 rather than V_1. And the panti-Pfaffian pair correlation between CFs in the half-filled second effective Landau level creates incompressible 3/8 state. The unconventional topologies of these states are reflected in anomalously low magneto-roton energies for these states.

We  will  briefly review  the  issue  of    "information loss"    during  the Hawking   evaporation of a  black hole,  and  argue that    the  quantum dynamical  reduction  theories, which  have  been  developed to  address the   measurement problem  in quantum mechanics,  possess the  elements to  diffuse the ``paradox”  at the qualitative  and  at   the  quantitative  level, leading to what  seems  to be an overall  coherent  picture.  

The  QCD axion is a curious Dark Matter candidate, having a mass like the neutrino, but behaving as Cold Dark Matter. I will review how this occurs, and discuss the interesting question  of whether WIMPs could be distinguished from axions with Large Scale Structure data.

The properties of a strange metal fermion model with infinite-range

interactions turn out to be closely related to those of charged black holes

with AdS2 horizons. I show that a microscopic computation of the ground

state entropy density of the fermion model yields precisely the Bekenstein-Hawking

entropy density of the black hole. The fermion model is UV finite and has no supersymmetry

Although the inflationary predictions for the primordial power spectrum of    density inhomogeneities   seem  very successful, there is an obscure part in our understanding of the emergence of the seeds of cosmic   structure:  How  does  a universe which at one pint  in time is described by a  state that is fully  homogeneous and isotropic,  evolve into a state that is not,   given that the dynamics  does not  contain any  source  for the  undoing of  such symmetry?   We will  discuss  an   approach that  offers  a resolution  of the  issue  in the context of  proposals to deal  with the measurement  problem in quantum  mechanics. We will  see that the   approach  naturally  resolves the difficulties  raised  by the  lack of  observation of tensor modes.