Monday, March 1st 2010

MIR@W-Day and CSC One-Day Workshop

Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick

Organiser: A. Rodriguez (Warwick), R.A. Roemer (Warwick), D. Ueltschi (Warwick)

Background and Purpose

Bosonic systems have fascinated people for a long time. The subject started in 1924–5 when Bose and Einstein noticed that a curious, genuinely quantum, phase transition occurs at low temperature. Einstein could even compute exactly the critical temperature!

Despite many interesting theoretical contributions, major questions remain open. Nobody has rigorously established the occurrence of a condensation in interacting systems. Whether interactions enhance or discourage the condensation is not clear and is still currently debated, with conflicting reports in the literature. There is room for exciting new understanding, and for precise speculations leading to experimental verifications.

Quantum disordered systems have been a major branch of condensed matter physics since the concept of localisation was introduced by Anderson. Static disorder is a major factor in the physics of a large variety of phenomena ranging from conductivity and metal-insulator transitions to spin glasses, neural networks and quantum chaos. Disorder is an essential element of quantum Hall physics and of the electronic properties of low-dimensional systems in general and it is central to some of the most challenging open questions in many-body systems. In particular, the interplay of disorder, interactions and dimensionality continues to be one of the most important outstanding problems in condensed matter physics. For example, the phase diagram of interacting bosons in the presence of disorder and as a function of dimensionality is still not properly known.

The recent extraordinary developments in cold atom physics have made possible the direct experimental control of the Hamiltonian of strongly-correlated atomic gases. This has led to the creation of systems of cold atoms in the laboratory, which are almost perfect realisations of the systems studied theoretically. For the first time, there is the very real prospect of theory and experiment being able to explore the properties of low-dimensional systems as a function of size, disorder and interactions in precisely the region of the phase diagram which is the most important and least well understood. Experiments on non-disordered ultracold atom gases in optical lattices have observed the theoretically predicted quantum phase transition from a superfluid state to a Mott insulator and a Tonks-Girardeau gas. There has also been progress towards Bose-Einstein condensation in microgravity.

Preliminary Programme

Some of the presentations are password protected.

Participants

The symposium  will start at 08:30am at the University of Warwick. Note that the university is located at the outskirts of Coventry and not in Warwick. See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/ for travel details and http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/maps/ for maps of the central campus. In case you come by car, parking is available for delegates at car park 15.

Venue

Registration will be held in the Common Room of the Mathematics Institute. The morning session talks (9:00-12:40) will be held in Lecture Room D1.07 and the afternoon session (14:00-17:30) in room B3.02 of the Mathematics Institute, Zeeman building. This is building 35 of the Warwick central campus.

The workshop will start with the registration at 08:30 am at the University of Warwick. Note that the university is located at the outskirts of Coventry and not in Warwick. See http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/ for travel details and http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/maps/ for maps of the central campus. In case you come by car, parking is available for delegates at car park 15.

Organizer's corner

• Forum