Physics Colloquium: "Exotic Quantum States of Spin-Orbit Coupled Bosons"

• Date
  Wed, Feb 06

  Time
  4:00 PM — 5:00 PM

  Address
  Marshak
  160 Convent Avenue
  

  Location
  Marshak, MR-418N

  p: 212.650.5572

  Admission
  Free

• Event Details

  Presented by Professor Tigran A. Sedrakyan, The William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute.

  Abstract:
  
  The recently discovered spin-orbit coupled boson systems are remarkable for their capacity to explore physics that may not be revealed in any other way. The spin-orbit couplings, which can be artificially engineered in cold-atom experiments, in many instances lead to single-particle dispersion relations exhibiting multiple minima or even degenerate manifold of minimal energy states. It is entirely the effect of collisions (i.e. boson-boson interactions) which lifts this degeneracy and leads to an amazing variety of completely new quantum many-body states. This talk describes a theoretical discovery of a novel phase of matter, where, at low densities, bosons essentially redress themselves and behave as fermions. This state is a composite fermion state with a Chern-Simons gauge field and filling factor one.