Abstract: It has long been appreciated that exactly solved mathematical models describing the statistical mechanics of interacting particles have played a key role in the development of formerly unrelated areas of mathematics and theoretical physics, such as the study of knots, links and braids, quantum groups, combinatorics, conformal field theory and condensed matter physics. However, over the past few years striking experimental achievements in trapping and cooling atoms in one-dimensional optical waveguides have provided remarkable realizations of exactly solved models in the lab. More generally the study of cold atomic matter with integrability provides a unique environment to explore novel quantum many-body phenomena like quantum liquids, quantum correlations, quantum criticality and quantum dynamics. In this talk I will describe some of these fundamental mathematical models and their relevance to recent and future experiments on such exotic many-body physics.

About the Speaker: Xi-Wen Guan graduated from Jilin University with PhD degree in Theoretical Physics in November, 1998. He then undertook postdoctoral research for 3 years at the Technische Universitat Chemnitz, Germany, the Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do sul, Porto Alegre, Brasil. Since his appointment at Australian National University (ANU) in February 2003, Prof. Guan has been working in the areas of mathematical physics and exactly solvable models in condensed matter, statistical mechanics, and cold atoms. He was promoted to Level C Fellow effective from January 2009 and became a senior Fellow in 2010. Since October 2012, he has been working as a fully professor at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Science. Prof. Guan holds a visiting professor position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University, China.

Date&Time: March 19, 2014 (Wednesday), 10:30 -11:30 a.m.
Location: 606 Conference Room