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The
Lise Meitner Distinguished Lecture
“Defects with Character:
Zero-Energy Majorana Modes in Condensed-Matter
Systems”
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Date: |
Download-files: |
Time: |
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Thursday, 02. June 2016 |
Audio-only-Recording as MP3-File
(smallest possible size):
- Audio.mp3 (ca.32 Mb) ========================================= Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support:
- Video.mp4 (ca.298 Mb) |
15:15 – 16:15 |
Speaker:
Bertrand I. Halperin (
Abstract :
Theory predicts the existence of some peculiar phases
of quantum condensed matter systems,
in which there are
extra degrees of freedom with very low energy, if localized “defects”
are present. In one
class of these phases, the size of the low-energy Hilbert space
corresponds to one-half degree of freedom per defect, and the defects are said too be
sites of localized
zero-energy “Majorana modes”. The defects are
predicted to obey
“non-Abelian statistics” --
i.e., if various defects can be moved around each other,
or if two identical
defects can be interchanged, the result will be
a unitary transformation
on the quantum
mechanical state that depends on the order in which operations are performed,
but is insensitive to many other details.
The talk will introduce these concepts and discuss
some attempts to realize them in
condensed matter systems.