Event date:
Apr
7
2026
12:00 pm
Superconductors, Black Holes, and Quantum Matter
Speaker(s)
Prof Subir Sachdev, Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University
Venue
LCE Auditorium - Basement SBASSE
Abstract
The quantum entanglement of many particles plays a central role in many aspects of modern physics. In the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, complex entanglement leads to a quantum state which doesn’t have any particle-like excitations at all. I will describe how such many-particle systems are helping us understand modern quantum materials, such as the high temperature superconductors, and the quantum mechanics of black holes.
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He was born in Delhi, although all his grandparents are from the Lahore area. He attended the Indian Institute to Technology, Delhi, and completed his studies in the US. He has been elected to national academies of science in India and the US, and the Royal Society in the U.K. He is a recipient of several awards, including the Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, and the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society. Sachdev has made extensive contributions to the theory of the diverse varieties of states of quantum matter, and of their behavior near quantum phase transitions.
