Out of equilibrum and disordered strongly interacting many particle systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As technology shrinks towards the nanoscale, intrinsic disorder in devices and the interactions between a device and its environment become increasingly important.  In particular, a device may not be in thermal equilibrium with its environment.  My research is focused on extending understanding of, and intuition for, out-of-equilibrium and disordered systems.  A comprehensive physical understanding of such systems requires the development of new concepts and theoretical methods.  To work towards this, I will study three out-of-equilibrium and disordered systems, with a short-term goal of obtaining detailed comparisons with current and future experiments.  In the long-term, my goal is to find more general principles, applicable to a wider class of systems.  The three systems I intend to study are: ultra-cold atomic gases; glassiness; and transport in two-dimensional electron systems.  Ultra-cold atomic gases can be cooled to form a new phase of matter, a Bose-Einstein condensate, at nanokelvins above absolute zero.  Recent experiments have shown that condensates are often not at equilibrium.  I intend to develop qualitative and quantitative descriptions of these experiments, which will have implications beyond ultra-cold atoms, as these systems are an ideal test-bed for the properties of interacting quantum systems.  Glassiness presents a complex theoretical problem as it involves the co-operative relaxation of very large numbers of microscopic units.  My experience in introducing a new theoretical description for local fluctuations in spin glasses will allow me to bring a new perspective to this old problem and to help to clarify the relationship between local and macroscopic dynamics in glassy systems.  Structures involving electrons confined to a two-dimensional layer are found to exhibit exotic phenomena in magnetic fields that often rely on disorder for their observation.  I will calculate quantities that can be compared with experiment to reveal the nature of excitations in these novel states.  The results of the research in this proposal will   be of great interest to the specific areas they are focused on, and provide progress towards a deeper understanding of out-of-equilibrium and disordered systems.