Topical review: Ronnie Rogers, Fractons

Wednesday 5 Jan 2022, 11:00 → 12:30 Europe/Stockholm

Albano Building 3

Fracton phases of matter are novel (and so far theoretical)
phases possessing elementary excitations with restricted mobility;
individual excitations are either completely immobile, or can only move
in certain directions. I'll begin by reviewing two paradigmatic lattice
spin models with fracton excitations, the X-cube model and Haah's cubic
code, explaining how the fractons arise and highlighting some key
physical features. I'll then describe how to build field theories of
fractons, focusing on recent work by Seiberg and collaborators. To do so
we will need to generalise traditional notions of field theory.