Gravity Seminar - "The golden age of chirality and quantum mechanics", Karl Landsteiner (Instituto de Física Teórica, Madrid) Seminar
For more information regarding this seminar, please email Oscar Campos Dias at O.J.Campos-Dias@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
Abstract: The concept of symmetry is one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Quantum mechanics is another. Sometimes they are not compatible with each other. In particular chiral symmetries suffer from quantum anomalies. I will review how quantum anomalies give rise to new transport phenomena of chiral media and their possible applications reaching from the physics of the quark gluon plasma, the electronics of new materials (Weyl semimetals) to quantum optics.
Speaker information
Karl Landsteiner, Instituto de Física Teórica, Madrid. Karl's research interest is mostly concerned with the collective behaviour of chiral matter. Chirality (greek for handedness) is an everyday experience, as its name says: our hands are chiral! In nature chirality is ubiquious, plants grow in spiral patterns (apparently 90% of all plants are right-handed), organic molecules are chiral, all life itself is chiral on its molecular level. However on the deepest level of nature, in quantum mechanics, something seems deeply wrong with chirality. In quantum physics the classical concept of chirality suffers from what is called an anomaly! The chiral symmetry is not compatible with quantum physics. This amazing and strange fact is called anomaly. The chiral anomaly has been discovered back in 1969 and was welcome. It explains the decay of the netural pion into photons. Curiously these anomalies give rise to new patterns in the collective behavior of chiral matter. When subjected to magnetic fields or to rotation chiral matter responds by generating currents. Even better these currents are dissipationless.