3:30–4:30 pm Maria Geoppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
Building on the legacies of Fermi and Fano: Bizarre quantum states of a few particles
Chris Greene, Purdue University
The rich world of few-body quantum mechanical phenomena, with 3, 4, or more particles, links physics across many orders of magnitude. The relevant sub-fields of physics have a wide variety across more than a dozen orders of magnitude: e.g., from few-atom recombination in the ultracold at sub-pico-eV energies to few-MeV collisions of nucleons. A great deal of our current understanding and predictive power has built on the toolkits developed by Enrico Fermi and Ugo Fano. Along the way, universal aspects of the interactions continue to emerge, while at the same time specific interesting differences emerge among this rich variety of few-body systems. This Colloquium will showcase some of the most interesting, unusual, and counter-intuitive quantum phenomena that have emerged from recent decades of effort in this field. Time permitting, I will also point out insights that connect our few-body quantum studies with systems of interest in chemical physics, such as the destruction of the simplest diatomic or triatomic molecules that collides with an incident electron having nearly no energy. Ugo Fano would refer to the theory development in this field, as the development of "physico-mathematical tools and intuition". [1] Rev. Mod. Phys. 89, 035006 (2017), "Universal few-body physics and cluster formation" [2] Phys. Rev. A 108, 042805 (2023), "Green’s-function treatment of Rydberg molecules with spins" [3] Physics Today, March 2010, p.40 "Universal insights from few-body land"