Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Very busy time....
Sorry for the light blogging - between departmental duties and deadline-motivated writing, it's been very difficult to squeeze in much blogging. Hopefully things will lighten up again in the next week or two. In the meantime, I suggest watching old episodes of the excellent show Scrapheap Challenge (episode 1 here). Please feel free to put in suggestions of future blogging topics in the comments below. I'm thinking hard about doing a series on phases and phase transitions.
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2 comments:
Regarding phases and phase transitions, if I recall correctly, you have written several blog posts on this issue in the past (http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-musing-about-phase-transitions.html, http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2009/07/phase-transitions-and-mean-field-theory.html, http://nanoscale.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-is-phase-of-matter.html).
I think what would be especially fruitful, were you to further pursue this direction in a series, would be to contrast such 'classical' phases, which all have in common that they can be described by a local order parameter, with the more recently discovered topological phases, which fundamentally require something different. If you want to go even further, perhaps you might consider highlighting the emerging trend that frequently, concepts and methods from quantum information, such as macroscopic long-range quantum entanglement and nonlocality, prove useful in characterizing such topological phases without local symmetry breaking.
See, e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02595
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