Quantum Cafe: Anatoli Polkovnikov

Quantum Café is CCQ’s ongoing seminar series: open to all bona fide members of the greater NYC scientific community and held every second week, Quantum Café presents a series of informal, highly interactive talks, typically by external speakers, which present the most interesting recent developments and open questions in our field.

Title: Phase space methods for dynamics of strongly correlated systems

Abstract: In this talk I will review basic ideas of Wigner-Weyl phase space representation of quantum dynamics and stress specifically the semiclassical approximation (a.k.a. truncated Wigner approximation). Then I will discuss how one can extend these ideas to quantum systems far from any natural classical limit by increasing phase space dimensionality, i.e. by introducing hidden variables. I will in particular show how these ideas can be applied to interacting fermions. I will illustrate how this methodology works to simulate dynamics in various experimentally relevant setups and also dynamics of the SYK model, which recently became a popular playground for studying quantum chaos.