Disorder, Interactions and Coherence: Warps and Delights

International Focus Workshop
13 July - 15 July 2016

Understanding the interplay of coherence and interactions in disordered systems is a formidable task which is at the heart of condensed matter physics. Over many decades this topic attracted researchers of diverse traits and philosophies who attempted the best techniques available at the time.

The key milestones in this area include, but are not limited to, the introduction of the influence functional approach in the '80, the powerful numerical techniques developed in the '90s, the concept of entanglement applied to this problem in the '00s and the recent advent of many-body localization.

However, despite impressive breakthroughs, every step forward has led to new open questions and mysteries. Recent developments indicate that progress in such a complex problem can only be achieved by synergy of efforts of researchers with diverse expertise.

This interdisciplinary workshop aims to attract experts from diverse fields to discuss a broad range of phenomena associated with the interplay of disorder, interactions and quantum coherence.

The underlying physics and concepts have much in common for such seemingly different problems as many-body effects and entanglement in cold-atom systems, disorder and fluctuations in quantum transport, and the quantum Hall states. Added to this is creation of quantized and topological excitations in statistical-mechanical systems, in superconductors and superfluids, The effects are pronounced in low-dimensional materials, at the nanoscale and far from thermal equilibrium.

The proposed workshop seeks to facilitate effective knowledge transfer between different areas concerned with the above topics.

The intention is to bring together the individuals who decades ago developed the key ideas in these areas and the younger generation of researchers. We believe such a meeting will be timely, both because of the important science and because it will be a good opportunity to honor 50 years in science of David "Dima" Khmelnitskii. Dima is a pivotal figure in Physics, who is widely known for his ingenious and pioneering work in the areas above and for an extraordinary impact upon the scientific life at the Landau institute, Cambridge University and beyond.

• Many-body localization
• Statistics of wave functions
• Disorder versus coherence in fermionic systems
• Disorder versus the long range order in bosonic systems
• Disorder and decoherence in metal-insulator transition
• Disorder, dynamical decoherence, and noises
• Disorder and topology: IQHE and NIQHE
• Topological excitations, non-integer quantum numbers and anomalous statistics
• Extremal and non-Gaussian statistics in mesoscopic and nano-systems
• New topological quantum states
• Topological quantization
• Non-equilibrium dynamical phases
• Applications to quantum computing
• Applications to biological systems