Center for Theoretical Physics Seminar

Monday, November 9, 1998, 3 p.m.
Plant Sciences Building, Room 1140

Superfluid  3He vs quantum vacuum

Grigori Volovik

(Helsinki University of Technology, Finland and Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Moscow)

Abstract:  There are three main classes of homogeneous Fermi-systems, which are characterized by the topology of the fermionic spectrum: (1) Systems with the gap in the spectrum; (2) Gapless systems with Fermi-surface; (3) Gapless systems with topologically stable point nodes. Superfluid 3He-A and electroweak vacuum belong to the universality class (3). The fermionic quasparticles (particles) in this class are chiral. The collective bosonic modes of the system of class (3)  are the effective gauge and gravitational fields.  This allowed us to model in 3He-A experiments such phenomena as axial anomaly, baryoproduction and magnetogenesis. The 3He-A textures induce the nontrivial effective metrics of the space, in which the free quasiparticles move along geodesics. One can simulate the conical singularities, torsion strings, event horizons, Hawking radiation, etc.

Host: Ted Jacobson


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