October 18th
when: Tuesday 3/9/2019, 11:00
where: KE E-541 (møterom)
speaker: Joost Slingerland
title:
abstract:
Topology deals with mathematical structures that are stable under
deformation. It has been used (with much varying success) to explain
stable structures in physcis too - for example the stability of atoms,
the quantization of electric charge and the existence of bosons and
fermions. It plays a role in finding stable excitations of
(super)fluids, and monopoles and even different stable vacua in gauge
theories like QCD. Recently, there has been a lot of excitement in
condensed matter physics over topological phases of matter. These have
many exciting properties - for example they can host anyons,
quasiparticles which are neither bosons nor fermions. The physics of
these systems can also be applied to fault tolerant topological
quantum computation (TQC). The second part of the talk will focus on
an approach to TQC which depends on the physics of Bose-Einstein
condensates of atoms with nonzero spin. These condensates allow for a
large variety of topologically distinct vortex excitations, which
behave as non-Abelian anyons. The vortices can be created and moved at
will using optical tweezers and could be used at minimum to simulate
small topological quantum computers.
This talk is based on joint work with Thomas Mawson, Timothy Petersen
and Tapio Simula, to be published in PRL