2:00–3:00 pm
Umang Mehta's PhD Thesis Defense
POSTMODERN FERMI LIQUIDS
Theoretical studies of gapless phases of interacting fermions have had a long history owing to their ubiquity in applications to various phenomena, ranging from metals and superconductors to cold quantum liquids and even neutron stars. Various approaches have been developed to tackle this problem, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. In this talk we present an alternate formalism which, in the spirit of postmodernism, attempts to forego the various dogmatic characteristics of the historic formulations and construct from bottom-up an effective theory for interacting Fermi liquids by employing a hidden geometric structure underlying the physics of such phases.
Consequently, we find a formalism which systematizes scaling properties of Fermi liquids, making them more transparently amenable to the toolbox of the renormalization group. As applications of this postmodern formalism, we set up pathways to a more robust analysis of more complex phases obtained from Fermi liquids, such as the long-standing problem of non-Fermi liquids and high-temperature superconductivity.
Committee Members:
Dam Thanh Son (Chair)
Michael Levin
Jeffrey Harvey
Woowon Kang
Umang will be joining CU Boulder as a postdoc.