The 2022 Chhabra-Landau Lecture takes place on April 7 at 3:55-4:55 PM in the Physics Auditorium (Rm. 202) and virtually on Zoom. Our guest speaker is Professor Andrew Millis from the Physics Department at Columbia University. He provided the following introduction for his talk titled "Meeting Dirac’s Challenge: Quantum Many-body Physics in the 21st Century":
In 1929 Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac wrote, with complete theoretical justification, “The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known” and he continued , “... the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.’’ This talk will present recent spectacular progress towards meeting Dirac’s challenge. The key insight, important on multiple levels, is that the quantum many-body problem is in essence a big data problem, with the solutions all revolving around appropriate compression of information. Crucial to the practical solution is a multimessenger approach demanding consistency between different methods. Specific examples and important open questions and challenges will be discussed.
