FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM AND QUANTUM PHENOMENA IN STRONGLY CORRELATED SYSTEMS

NONTECHNICAL SUMMARYThis award supports theoretical research and education in non-equilibrium physics. Thanks to major advances in technology, new states of matter can be accessed experimentally by driving a system of many interacting particles far from their unperturbed equilibrium state. For example, researchers are now able to stir up electrons in a superconducting metal with an intense ultrashort pulse of electromagnetic radiation while fully maintaining the overall superconductivity of the material. The conventional tools of statistical physics do not apply in such non-equilibrium conditions. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop reliable theories of these phenomena, and to predict and describe new states of far-from-equilibrium quantum matter that can potentially be harnessed in novel quantum devices. The implementation of the research plan will at the same time foster training and education of graduate students and postdocs. Integral parts of this project are the proposed graduate course on non-equilibrium many-body physics, and the development of interactive methods for teaching non-science majors, which will be implemented in collaboration with the PI's colleagues in science pedagogy at Rutgers.TECHNICAL SUMMARYThis award supports theoretical research and education in non-equilibrium physics. The past decade has witnessed unprecedented experimental access to coherent dynamics of many-body interacting systems. Far-from-equilibrium superconductivity and superfluidity is an important separate subfield that has been growing rapidly since the PI's early influential work. Nevertheless, a universal description and understanding of the origin of non-equilibrium phases commonly seen in different superfluids is still lacking. This project aims specifically at developing both. The PI also plans to explore non-equilibrium topological superfluids that are expected to have much richer topological properties than in equilibrium, as well as non-equilibrium phases and instabilities in the dynamics of multicomponent superfluids. A further goal of this project is to analyze how the dynamics change as we gradually go from quantum to classical mechanics using the central spin model as an example, and to study the driven-dissipative dynamics of ensembles of two-level atoms that are strongly coupled through a cavity mode. The last research component of this project addresses mesoscopic and nanoscale properties of quantum integrable systems. Random Matrix Theory (RMT) enjoyed a great deal of success as a description of many such universal properties in non-integrable complex systems. The PI plans to develop a counterpart of RMT for quantum integrable systems starting from basic principles. In a separate study, the PI will apply this newly created integrable matrix theory to the problem of quantum irreversibility.The implementation of the research plan will at the same time foster training and education of graduate students and postdocs. Integral parts of this project are the proposed graduate course on non-equilibrium many-body physics, and the development of interactive methods for teaching non-science majors, which will be implemented in collaboration with the PI's colleagues in science pedagogy at Rutgers.