Physics beyond Experience

T. Senthil

Central to our understanding of quantum many particle physics are two ideas due to Landau. The first is the notion of the electron as a well-defined quasiparticle excitation in the many body state. The second is that of the order parameter to distinguish different states of matter. Experiments in a number of correlated materials raise serious suspicions about the general validity of either notion. A growing body of theoretical work has confirmed these suspicions, and explored physics beyond Landau's paradigms. This article provides an overview of some of these theoretical developments.

W. Wayt Gibbs

Ophir Mottes

Bogdan Szenkaryk Pinopa

In the article is presented the view that the creators of today's physics went far beyond the area of ​​classical physics. They created and developed two theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and their work was based on the principle: the more complex are the physical ideas and difficult to understand, the better; the more ideas will be introduced to the physics and they will be beyond the reach of human imagination and experience, the better. In short, they created a physics based on chutzpah principles, in which the less logic and cause-effect dependences, the better. Article aims to raise awareness of logically minded physicists that it is time to eliminate chutzpah ideas from physics and replace them by logically associated ones along with experimental facts.

Michael L. Wall, Rick Mukherjee, Shah Saad Alam +2 more

We calculate the parameters of the recently derived many-channel Hubbard model that is predicted to describe ultracold nonreactive molecules in an optical lattice, going beyond the approximations used by Do\ifmmode \mbox{\c{c}}\else \c{c}\fi{}aj et al. [A. Do\ifmmode \mbox{\c{c}}\else \c{c}\fi{}aj et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 135301 (2016)]. Although those approximations are expected to capture the qualitative structure of the model parameters, finer details and quantitative values are less certain. To set expectations for experiments, whose results depend on the model parameters, we describe the approximations' regime of validity and the likelihood that experiments will be in this regime, discuss the impact that the failure of these approximations would have on the predicted model, and develop theories going beyond these approximations. Not only is it necessary to know the model parameters in order to describe experiments, but the connection that we elucidate between these parameters and the underlying assumptions that are used to derive them will allow molecule experiments to probe new physics. For example, transition state theory, which is used across chemistry and chemical physics, plays a key role in our determination of lattice parameters, thus connecting its physical assumptions to highly accurate experimental investigation.

William Carter