This workshop is dedicated to the memory of Kazumi Maki
On 10 September 2008 Kazumi succumbed to a long battle with cancer. He was among an elite group of Japanese physicists who fostered the development of physics as a science during the 20th century. After earning his Ph.D. in physics at Kyoto University, Kazumi arrived in the United States in the 1960s and worked as a research associate with the famous physicist Yoichiro Nambu, who was just awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics, at the University of Chicago. He joined the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1974. He dedicated his life to researching superconductors, charge density wave, and spin density wave systems. Stephan Haas, his friend and colleague, said “Maki loved to laugh; he loved life,” and “He was easily excitable – mostly about science. He had many passions, but science was his life.” Kazumi was an invited speaker of the first international conference on correlated systems held in Évora, in May and June 1989.
The Workshop
An intensive exchange of ideas between related fields of theoretical physics allows for a rapid spreading of new concepts and of new methods among different research directions. This should be particularly true for the topics chosen for the planned workshop on Correlations and Coherence in Quantum Matter: quantum-many-body theory, statistical mechanics, quantum field theory and quantum computation. This workshop will provide an excellent setting for the promotion of this cross-fertilization, through a well-balanced menu of talks by leading experts, through lively poster sessions and through numerous informal discussions. The past experience of the organizers has amply proven that the city of Évora offers a unique environment for this kind of workshop.Special attention will be given to recent advances in the fractional quantum Hall effect, quantum phase transitions, magnetic chains and ladders, atomic gases on optical lattices with reduced dimensions, quantum computation (for instance the topological protection of quantum bits), the many facets of graphene (such as the minimal conductivity, the anomalous quantum Hall effect, or the connection to special relativity and gravity), metal-insulator transitions, spin liquids, fractional charge and statistics, and transport through quantum dots. Both analytical and numerical methods will be discussed, for instance exact solutions by the Bethe Ansatz (which now allows for the calculation of correlation functions), bosonization, techniques of conformal field theory, new approaches for treating non-equilibrium phenomena, the use of gauge fields to take into account certain constraints, the (numerical) Density Matrix Renormalization Group, and matrix product states that allow to formulate promising variational many-body wave functions.
Workshop site
Anfiteatro 131-AEdifício do Espirito Santo
Universidade de Évora