This is just a short post to advertise our new pre-print that appeared on arXiv this morning: “Time Evolution in Many-Body Localized Phases with the Flow Equation Approach”. I’ll save the full write-up of it until the paper is properly published: for my non-academic readers, let me just be clear up front that this is… Continue reading New Paper: Time Evolution in Many-Body Localized Phases
When I moved to St Andrews as a long-haired, clean-shaven 17-year-old, it wasn’t to embark on a career as a quantum theorist – my degree was originally to be in astrophysics. For two years, I was an astrophysics student, before eventually ditching space in favour of quantum physics. There were two main reasons for this.… Continue reading Seeing Into The Quantum Heart of Matter
I’m just back from a 4-day conference in Bad Honnef, just south of Bonn. It’s a beautiful place! My last workshop log went down fairly well, at least within the research community, so I figured I’d do another as a summary of what was discussed at the conference. Despite the length of this post, there’s… Continue reading Conference Log: Bad Honnef
I’ve just spent a really fun few days at King’s College London, at the PhD-student-run Workshop on Localisation in Quantum Systems, and since I blogged last week about the general research area I work in, I thought I’d do a little write-up of the workshop for anyone interested who couldn’t attend. Apologies that this is… Continue reading Workshop Log: King’s College London
It’s always exciting in science when a surprise comes along and something you thought you knew turns out to be wrong. In the last decade, spurred on by recent experimental advances, condensed matter theorists have turned back to an old problem with renewed enthusiasm, and have discovered an enigmatic phase of matter that behaves unlike… Continue reading My Current Research Topic: Many Body Localisation
One of the biggest problems with researching quantum mechanics is that it’s often hard to visualise what we’re dealing with. Are we talking particles, or are we talking waves? Or are we talking about abstract excitations of a quantum field, somewhere between neither and both? For the most part, we focus on calculating properties that… Continue reading The Role of Disorder: Under the Microscope
[This post originally appeared on 21stcentury.co.uk] The paradox of perfection is a philosophical idea that for something to be perfect, it must be imperfect. By making something less perfect in form, it can often be made more perfect in function. Whatever the deeper philosophical implications of this statement, it’s almost a literal truth in the… Continue reading The Paradox of Perfection
Broken Symmetry 