3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall, KPTC 106
Hydrodynamics Beyond Fluids: University in Quantum Many-Body Dynamics
Luca Delacrétaz, UChicago
Hydrodynamics usually brings to mind flowing liquids. Its central idea, however, is much broader: once an interacting system thermalizes, its late-time behavior is governed by the slow dynamics of conserved quantities. This is true whether the system is a strongly correlated metal or insulator, a quark–gluon plasma, a spin chain, or even a quantum circuit. I will show how modern hydrodynamic effective field theories turn this universality into precise, testable predictions, reveal new quantum transport parameters with no classical counterparts, and impose universal constraints on how quickly systems can thermalize. Finally, I will describe how symmetries beyond conventional groups give rise to unexpected slow dynamics and new hydrodynamic universality classes, expanding our understanding of what constitutes a symmetry in physics.