Physics Colloquium
Spin Dynamics as a Probe of New Hydrodynamics and Topological States
Joel Moore, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract: This talk discusses two examples of how a combination of analytical and computational methods can serve to connect basic theoretical ideas about correlated states to quantum information quantities and neutron scattering experiments. The ground state of a chain of antiferromagnetically interacting spins (the 1D "Heisenberg model") is one of the solvable hydrogen atoms of many-body physics, but its dynamics remained opaque for eighty years. We introduce the Heisenberg model's novel fluid-like dynamical regime at high temperatures and describe its realization in a variety of recent experiments ranging from neutron scattering on crystals to optical lattice emulation with atoms. It turns out that the dynamics of spins in this canonical model are described by the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang dynamical universality class, which is well known from classical problems such as driven interfaces. For frustrated systems in higher dimensions, controlled comparisons between theory and experiment are more difficult except for a small number of tractable cases. We forge ahead nevertheless and present theoretical arguments that a chiral spin liquid is likely to appear near the Mott transition in some triangular lattice materials, and second, that other kinds of spin liquids and quantum critical points are suggested in recent experiments.
Speaker Bio: Joel Moore is a Simons Investigator and currently holds the Chern-Simons Chair in Mathematical Physics at UC Berkeley. He is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Monday, April 3, 2023 at 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Science and Engineering Building, 307
1414 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996
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