Niels Bohr Institutet > Kalender - det sker på NBI > 2010 > NBI Lecture by Subir S...

NBI Lecture by Subir Sachdev

About the speaker: Subir Sachdev is Professor of Physics at Harvard University.
He also has a visiting appointment as Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter
Institute for Theoretical Physics. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in
1985.
His research has focused on a variety of quantum materials, and
especially on their quantum phase transitions. He was an early proponent
of using ideas based on quantum criticality to describe the phase
diagram of the cuprate superconductors.
He is the author of the book Quantum Phase Transitions (Cambridge University Press,1999). In recent years, he has applied the AdS/CFT correspondence to describe strongly interacting phases of quantum matter.

Abstract: I will introduce the theory of quantum criticality, using recent experiments on antiferromagnetic insulators.
I will then discuss how ideas from quantum criticality could help solve some of the mysteries posed by the cuprate high temperature superconductors.
Finally, I will give a simple introduction to the AdS/CFT correspondence discovered in string theory, and describe its connection to the strongly coupled quantum critical points of the cuprates.