4–6 Oct 2017
SU campus
Europe/Stockholm timezone

Quantum thermalization in holography and the laboratory

6 Oct 2017, 09:00
45m
P216 (SU campus)

P216

SU campus

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is in this regard a no-brainer but its ultimate consequence for experiment turns out to be stunningly weird (unpublished).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).

Presentation materials