March 11 -1 3, 2018

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Location

The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY

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Organizers​

• S. Gopalakrishnan (CUNY)

• V. Oganesyan (CUNY)

• A. Chandran (BU)

• C. Laumann (BU)

• A. Polkovnikov (BU)

• R. Konik (BNL)

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Overview

In the past few years, nonequilibrium quantum dynamics has become a central theme of condensed matter, quantum optics, quantum information, and high-energy physics. The central question in this field—of how irreversibility emerges (or in some cases fails to emerge) from the linear, reversible laws of quantum mechanics—affects questions ranging from the feasibility of building quantum computers to the nature of the black hole information paradox. At the same time, information-theoretic concepts such as entanglement have become central to our understanding of thermalization, and have also become directly measurable in experiments with ultracold atoms. These developments have been stimulated by the cross-fertilization of ideas in small inter-disciplinary workshops.The proposed CUNY-BU workshop continues in this tradition and aims to bring together a group of creative experts, young and old, to push the non-equilibrium frontier. The main thrust of the workshop is to arrive at a synthesis of the exciting developments in these disparate fields. The topics to be covered fall in four broad categories: (1) new concepts such as many-body quantum scars, fractons, and more generally the role constraints play in unconventional many-body quantum dynamics; (2) recent developments in integrable systems, particularly the understanding of diffusion and the dynamics of quantum information; (3) unifying the emerging understanding of dynamics in isolated quantum systems with what is known about the dynamics of dissipative systems; and (4) experimental developments in quantum gas microscopes and related settings that allow one to take single snapshots of many-body systems, and therefore enable one to probe new classes of theoretical objects, such as non-local order parameters and multipoint correlators.

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This workshop brought together leading theorists working in non-equilibrium quantum condensed matter together with selected experimental and high energy theory speakers. It builds on the momentum of successful workshops run at CUNY and BU over the last decade by several of the organizers.