IISER Pune invites you to:
Fourth Annual Homi Bhabha Memorial Public Lecture
Strange Metals and Black Holes
Date: Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Time: 6.00 pm
Venue: Sir C.V. Raman Auditorium, Lecture Hall Complex, IISER Pune
Abstract: A 'strange metal’ is a new state of matter, formed by electrons in many modern materials. In this state, the electrons quantum entangle with each other across long distances, and conduct electric current collectively (rather than one-by-one, as in an ordinary metal like copper). As they are cooled, most strange metals also become superconductors at relatively high temperatures, in which electric current flows with zero resistance. Black holes are stars so dense that even light is not able to escape their gravitational attraction. Remarkably, there is an equivalence between the quantum theories of these very different physical systems: strange metals and black holes. The talk will illustrate this equivalence with a very simple model of a strange metal, which can also be viewed as a theory of primitive black hole.
About the Speaker: Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University, specialising in Condensed Matter Theory. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, USA, in 2014. Among many other honours, he was awarded the Dirac Medal by the Australian Insitute of Physics, and recently received the prestigious Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society for his “seminal contributions to the theory of quantum phase transitions, quantum magnetism, and fractionalised spin liquids, and for his leadership in the physics community.”
The lecture is free and open to all.
