Mesoscopic physics of matter waves

Ram K. Varma

Peter Schlagheck

Minchul LEE, Mahn‐Soo Choi

Both classical and quantum principles coexist in the mesoscopic world, something between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds.More precisely, mesoscopic physics studies how the "coherence", which governs the wave property and especially the interference effect of matter, disappear gradually as the scale increases from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale.Another important issue in mesoscopic physics is many-body effects, which originate from the interaction among electrons.Many-body effects are a fundamental issue in all modern physics, but mesoscopic physics is particularly well adopted for their study because mesoscopic systems allow for tunability of various parameters, which is not possible in bulk systems.Further, the interplay between coherence and many-body effects leads to rich physical phe-

P. G. Kevrekidis, D. J. Frantzeskakis, R. Carretero-González

Nicolas Cherroret

This manuscript presents a selection of works on the coherent evolution of atomic matter waves in random potentials. In this context, a number of interference, « mesoscopic » phenomena surviving a disorder average are discussed, in particular in the regime where Anderson localization shows up: coherent backscattering, coherent forward scattering, mesoscopic echo and quantum boomerang effect. The interplay between weak atomic interactions and Anderson localization is also touched upon for spreading wave packets, a scenario frequently considered in experiments. The last chapter, finally, gives an overview of recent works by the author on multiple scattering of light in media of dimension « (2+1) ». These peculiar systems, originally introduced to demonstrate Anderson localization of light in 2D, have sparked a growing interest in the recent years, for light propagation is governed by an effective Schrödinger equation and thus mimics the behavior of a matter wave. We here show that when the vector character of light is properly taken into account, these systems in fact display a physics much richer than the one pertained to this sole analogy.

Hermann Haken, Hans Christoph Wolf