Physics (Internal)

Universality far from equilibrium: from integrability to many-body localization

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

In this talk, I will argue that the concepts of quantum criticality and universality can emerge at very high energy, far from thermal equilibrium. After discussing examples of universality in quantum quenches — the abrupt change of a control parameter in a quantum system, I will review the physics of many-body localized systems that fail to self-thermalize in isolation. I will then describe the new types of nonequilibrium phase transitions that can arise in the presence of many-body localization, and introduce novel effective renormalization group approaches to capture their universal critical properties.