Classes for Wednesday, Feb. 20, are currently in session. All faculty, staff, and students should use their best judgment when traveling to campus. Please notify your supervisor or classroom instructor if safety becomes an issue.
-
About
-
Academics
- Academics Overview
- Graduate Studies Overview
-
Schools and Divisions
- The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
- CUNY School of Medicine
- Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership
- School of Education
- Grove School of Engineering
- Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at Center for Worker Education (CWE)
- Division of Humanities and the Arts
- Division of Science
- Admissions
- Student Affairs
- Research
Physics Colloquium: Lea F. Santos, Thouless and Relaxation Time Scales in Many-Body Quantum Systems
Physics Colloquium: Lea F. Santos, Thouless and Relaxation Time Scales in Many-Body Quantum Systems
Thouless and Relaxation Time Scales in Many-Body Quantum Systems
Lea F. Santos, Professor of Physics, Yeshiva University, New York
A major open question in studies of nonequilibrium quantum dynamics is the identification of the time scales involved in the relaxation process of isolated quantum systems that have many interacting particles. Using experimental observables and a realistic disordered many-body quantum model, we unveil three different time scales: a very short time that characterizes the early fast decay of the initial state, and two much longer times that increase exponentially with system size. These are the Thouless time and the relaxation time. The Thouless time refers to the point beyond which the dynamics acquire universal features, and relaxation happens when the evolution reaches a stationary state. We show that in chaotic systems, the Thouless time is much smaller than the relaxation time, while for systems approaching a many-body localized phase, they merge together. Our results are compared with those for random matrices, which corroborates their generality.
Dr. Lea F. Santos is a Professor of Physics with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of São Paulo. Postdoctoral experience included work in random matrix theory at Yale, and developing new dynamical decoupling techniques at Dartmouth College. She is a member of the APS, IOP, IAMP, AAPT, Anacapa Society, and Committee of the Concerned Scientist.
Teaching and Research Interests:
Research interests include quantum transport, thermalization of isolated and open quantum systems, localization, metal-insulator transition, quantum chaos, two-body random ensembles, spin systems, dynamics of fermionic and bosonic systems with correlated and uncorrelated on-site disorder, quantum control, dynamical decoupling methods, decoherence, quantum-classical transition, measurement problem, and foundations of quantum mechanics.