Anyonic Quantum Glasses Seminar - Romain Vasseur

Event Date: 

Thursday, February 19, 2015 - 2:30pm to 4:00pm

Event Location: 

  • 2250 Elings Hall

Event Price: 

Free

Event Contact: 

Sean Fraer

Email: seanfr@microsoft.com

Phone: 805-893-8818

  • Q Seminar

 In this talk, I will discuss the physics of many-body “hot” quantum glasses: specifically, many-body localized systems and their critical variants. I will argue that the latter category includes disordered Ising, Potts, and anyonic chains whose excited-state properties and dynamics can be accessed via real-space renormalization group methods. As disorder is weakened below a critical value, these non-thermal quantum glasses melt via a continuous dynamical phase transition into a classical thermal liquid. I will describe an effective model for such quantum-to-classical transitions and use it to compute their universal critical properties.