Speaker
Mike Guidry
Description
Superconductivity and superfluidity having generically
recognizabl features are observed or suspected across a
strikingly broad range of physical systems: traditional BCS
superconductors, cuprate high temperature superconductors,
iron-based high-temperature superconductors, organic
superconductors, heavy-fermion superconductors, and
superfluid helium-3 in condensed matter, in many aspects of
low-energy nuclear structure physics, and in various exotic
possibilities for gravitationally condensed objects such as
neutron stars. Microscopically these systems differ
fundamentally but the observed superconductivity and
superfluidity exhibit two universal features: (1) They
result from a condensate of fermion Cooper pairs, and (2)
They represent emergent collective behavior that can have
only an abstract dependence on the underlying microscopic
physics. This universality can hardly be a coincidence but
a unified understanding of superconductivity and
superfluidity across these highly disparate fields seems
impossible microscopically. A unified picture may be
possible if superconductivity and superfluidity are viewed
as resulting from physics that depends only on broad
physical principles operating systematically at the
emergent scale, with physics at the underlying microscopic
scale entering only parametrically. I will give an
overview of superconductivity and superfluidity found in
various fermionic condensed matter, nuclear physics, and
neutron star systems. I will then propose that all these
phenomena result from the systematic occurrence of generic
algebraic structures for the emergent effective Hamiltonian,
with the underlying microscopic physics being largely
irrelevant except for influencing parameter values.
