Strange and subtle states of matter – the topological ideas behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics

Goldbart, Paul M.

Title:

Strange and subtle states of matter – the topological ideas behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics

dc.contributor.author	Goldbart, Paul M.
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Physics	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2016-12-06T18:51:10Z
dc.date.available	2016-12-06T18:51:10Z
dc.date.issued	2016-11-14
dc.description	Presented on November 14, 2016 at 6:00 p.m. in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Room 152.	en_US
dc.description	Dr. Paul Goldbart is the Dean of the College of Sciences and a Professor in the School of Physics. His research interests are statistical and soft matter physics, quantum nanoscience, quantum fluids and solids, quantum information, and law and economics.	en_US
dc.description	Runtime: 62:59 minutes	en_US
dc.description.abstract	The gases, liquids, and solids that humans have known and harnessed since prehistory are human-scale reflections of how atoms and molecules are organized at the atomic scale. This organization is driven by the forces exerted by atoms and molecules on one another. At high temperatures, the organization consists only of local conspiracies that continually form and decay but are too small to have much impact. At low temperatures, however, the conspiracies spread to become global revolutions, which bring new phases of matter that exhibit new properties reflecting the new organization. Rigidity, magnetism, liquid crystallinity, and superconductivity are just a handful of examples of such properties, which we call emergent collective properties. Until recently, organization meant geometry: Picture the tidy lattice of ions in a crystal of table salt. Nowadays, however, in the light of the elegant ideas put forward by David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, Mike Kosterlitz, and the many they have inspired, physicists recognize that organization can be subtler and more elusive. It can be invisible to geometry, though detectable via topology, and still trigger revolutions in the human-scale properties that make matter useful. My aim is to spend fifty minutes at the intersection of beauty and impact. I shall introduce the circle of ideas that underlie classical and quantum phases of matter and then focus on the “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter” that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics is celebrating.	en_US
dc.format.extent	62:59 minutes
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/56063
dc.language	English	en_US
dc.publisher	Georgia Institute of Technology	en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Physics Public Lecture Series
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Frontiers in Science Public Lecture
dc.subject	Nobel prize	en_US
dc.subject	Physics	en_US
dc.title	Strange and subtle states of matter – the topological ideas behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics	en_US
dc.type	Moving Image
dc.type.genre	Lecture
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.relation.ispartofseries	School of Physics Public Lecture Series
relation.isSeriesOfPublication	f931f7b7-fef6-4b8f-b8a7-d8b64b5536bd