Murray Batchelor - Australian National University
The cool world of quantum Bose and Fermi gases
Like most of the audience, I was inspired to work on self-avoiding walks by TonyGuttmann. Much of the progress made from the perspective of exactly solved O(n)models was driven by input from the wealth of knowledge that Tony has amassedover the years with his students, postdocs and colleagues. Fortunately, theexact results are in 2D, where the self-avoiding constraint is most severe.
The study of ultracold Bose and Fermi gases is without doubt the most active field in physics at the moment. A recent article described it as the revolution that has not stopped since the first Bose-Einstein condensate was made 10 years ago. A point of great excitement from our own perspective is the experimental realization of quantum gases in 1D, where quantum effects are most pronounced. Currently the race is on to create the first 1D Fermi gas and suddenly a number of 1D models exactly solved over 30 years ago by means of the Bethe Ansatz find themselves in the spotlight. I will discuss recent work on some of these exactly solved models, including the interacting Bose gas, the interacting Fermi Gas and an interacting Bose-Fermi mixture. These models reveal a number of subtle quantum effects which are potentially observable in experiments.
The results reported on here are based on joint work with Xi-Wen Guan, Norman Oelkers and Michael Bortz.