2018 F. Duncan Haldane

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.