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Stanford Physics Department event

Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Anomalous hydrodynamics of low dimensional quantum systems

Summary
Romain Vasseur (Physics, UMass Amherst)
Hewlett Teaching Center, Rm. 200
Apr
25
Date(s)
Content

The field of hydrodynamics of quantum systems has experienced a revival in the past decade, as an effective theory describing how many-body quantum systems evolve from local to global equilibrium. This has been largely driven by the advent of new experimental platforms, from strongly interacting ultracold gases to pristine solid-state systems with strong interactions and long mean free times. Hydrodynamics is particularly rich for low-dimensional fluids, featuring transport anomalies such as long-time tails, and proximity of many realistic systems to integrability. In this talk, I will focus on the hydrodynamics of systems close to integrable limits, featuring infinitely-many approximate conservation laws and long-lived quasiparticle excitations. I will review recent successes of this theory, and use it to argue that isotropic magnets in one dimension can exhibit a breakdown of Fick’s diffusion law, corresponding to anomalous, “superdiffusive” transport properties. I will discuss recent experiments probing these transport anomalies and conclude with open questions that they raise.