The University of Michigan's Department of Physics hosts the annual Ta-You Wu Lecture, which is one of the most prestigious lecture events in our Department. The Lectureship was endowed in 1991 through generous gifts from the University of Michigan Alumni Association in Taiwan. It is named in honor of Michigan Physics alumnus and honorary Doctor of Science, Ta-You Wu, one of the central figures of the 20th century in the Chinese and Taiwanese physics communities.
2018 Ta-You Wu Lecture in Physics
F. Duncan Haldane
Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics and Nobel Laureate (Princeton University)
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
4:10-5:10 PM
1800 Chemistry Dow Lab
Topological Quantum Matter, Entanglement, and a "Second Quantum Revolution"
While the laws of quantum mechanics have remained unchanged and have passed all tests for the last eighty-five years, new discoveries about the exotic states that they allow, “entanglement”, and ideas from quantum information theory, have greatly changed our perspective, and some believe that a “second quantum revolution” is currently underway. The discovery of unexpected “topological states of matter”, and their possible use for “topologically-protected quantum information processing” is one of the important themes of these developments, and will be described.
Biographical Sketch for Professor F. Duncan Haldane
Professor Haldane is currently developing a new geometric description of the fractional quantum Hall effect that introduces the "shape" of the "composite boson", described by a "unimodular" (determinant 1) spatial metric-tensor field as the fundamental collective degree of freedom of FQHE states. See arXiv:1106.3375 This new "Chern-Simons + quantum geometry" description is a replacement for the "Chern-Simons + Ginzburg-Landau" paradigm introduced c.1990. Unlike its predecessor, it provides a description of the FQHE collective mode that agrees with the Girvin-Macdonald-Platzman "single-mode approximation". This work grew out of an earlier study arxiv:0906.1854 of the dissipationless "Hall viscosity" of FQHE states.
Professor Haldane holds many honors: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow (1984-88); Fellow of the American Physical Society (1986-); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) (1992-); recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize of the American Physical Society (1993); Fellow of the Royal Society of London (1996-); Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK) (1996-); Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2001-); Lorentz Chair at the Lorentz Institute, Leiden (2008); co-recipient (with Charles Kane and Shoucheng Zhang, (photo, talk) of the 2012 ICTP Dirac Medal; Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics (2013-2014), Nobel Prize for Physics 2016 (co-laureates David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz); elected to National Academy of Sciences (Foreign Associate) May 2017.
Previous Lectures in This Series
View an assortment of past Ta-You Wu lectures on YouTube.
- 2017 Nobel laureate Kip S. Thorne: Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
- 2016 David Spergel: Our Simple but Strange Universe
- 2015 Dr. Eric Betzig: Imaging Life at High Spatiotemporal Resolution
- 2014 Wendy Freedman: The Universe: Continuing Surprises
- 2014 Dennis Overbye: Confessions of a Dinosaur in the Age of New Media
- 2013 Nobel laureate David Wineland: Superposition, Entanglement, and Raising Schrödinger's Cat
- 2012 No lecture this year
- 2011 Gérard Mourou, Former Director of the Laboratoire d’ Optique Appliquée at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Technique Avancée & Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique (France): Laser-Based High Energy Physics
- 2010 Nobel laureate Samuel C. C. Ting: An Experiment to Explore the Mysteries of Space: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station
- 2009 Helen Quinn: Wandering Planets, Falling Apples, Curving Spaces, Whirling Stars: How Unraveling the Mysteries of Gravity Has Taught Us About the Universe.
- 2008 Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek: The Universe is a Strange Place
- 2007 100th Birthday Celebration of the late Ta-You Wu: Distinguished Lecturer, Frank H. Shu, The Formation of Stars and Planetary Systems
- 2006 Nobel laureate Eric A. Cornell: Is Warm Glass More Sticky Than Cold Glass? Temperature and Casimir Force
- 2005 Nobel laureate Anthony J. Leggett: Does the Everyday World Really Obey Quantum Mechanics?
- 2004 Nobel laureate David J. Gross: Asymptotic Freedom and the Emergence of QCD (Or How I Won the Nobel Prize)
- 2003 Sir Martin Rees: Where is Cosmology Going?
- 2002 David Wilkinson (1935-2002): The Cosmic Microwave Backround Radiation
- 2001 Freeman Dyson: Is Life Analog or Digital?
- 2000 Nobel laureate Horst L. Stormer: Fractional Electronic Charges and other Tales from Flatland
- 1999 Nobel laureate Steven Chu: Seeing and Holding onto Atoms and Biological Molecules
- 1998 Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010): Fractals and Scale-Invariant Roughness in
the Sciences - 1997 Paul C. W. Chu: The Path of Zero Resistance
- 1996 Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932-2007): Principles of Adhesion
- 1995 Nobel laureate T. D. Lee: Symmetry and Asymmetry
- 1994 Nobel laureate Joseph Taylor: Binary Pulsars and Relativistic Gravity
- 1993 Abraham Pais (1918-2000): George Uhlenbeck Remembered
- 1992 Nobel laureate C. N. Yang: Considerations on Carbon 60
