02/22/2021
By Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen
To join: Contact Joanne Gagnon-Ketchen for zoom link.
“Phase transitions in quantum dynamics,“ Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
Abstract: Conventional phase transitions are abrupt changes in the equilibrium state of a system as some knob (e.g., temperature or magnetic field) is tuned. However, an entirely different class of transitions can take place at which the nature of a system's dynamics changes abruptly even though the equilibrium state does not change in any detectable way. I will survey these transitions -- which occur in a variety of quantum systems -- and their signatures in linear response, nonlinear response, and properties like many-body entanglement.
Bio: Sarang Gopalakrishnan graduated from Amherst College with a BA in Physics and Mathematics in 2006. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2012). He has since been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (2012-2015) and a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at Caltech (2015-2016). He then joined at CUNY College of Staten Island and in 2021 has joined Pennsylvania State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. He is the author of more than 70 publications. He is also an awardee of the NSF Early Career Program (CAREER) grant. His research ranges widely across the fields of theoretical condensed matter physics, atomic physics, and quantum optics.