Speaker
Jan Zaanen
Description
The simple moral of eigenstate thermalization is that what we
think is the rattling of classical things producing heat is a
delusion caused by our incapacity to keep track of the flow of
quantum information in the enormous many-body Hilbert
space. Are there circumstances where it is impossible to
construct such a consistent classical metaphor? Helped by
holography we stumbled recently into a number of cases.
Even in the elementary physics of expanding cold atom
clouds a vivid example has been identified
(arXiv:1703.02489). Planckian dissipation is in this regard a
no-brainer but its ultimate consequence for experiment turns
out to be stunningly weird (unpublished). Finally, the
holographic incarnation of optical pump-probe experiments
predicts that strange metals should invariably exhibit the
phenomenon of instantaneous thermalization. I will argue
that this suggests a critical test of the UV independence
notion by mobilizing condensed matter experiment
(arXiv:1708.08279).
