Many Body Physics: Unfinished Revolution

Samuel K. K. Blankson

Michael El-Batanouny

Piers Coleman

The study of many body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new states and properties of matter,phenomena such as superfluidity,the Meissner,the Kondo and the fractional quantum hall effect,have driven the development of new conceptual frameworks for our understanding about collective behavior,the ramifications of which have spread far beyond the confines of terrestrial condensed matter physics — to cosmology,nuclear and particle physics. Here I shall selectively review some of the developments in this field,from the cold-war period,until the present day. I describe how,with the discovery of new classes of collective order,the unfolding puzzles of high temperature superconductivity and quantum criticality,the prospects for major conceptual discoveries remain as bright today as they were more than half a century ago. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Stefan Flörchinger

Annales Henri Poincaré, Piers Coleman

Abstract.The study of many-body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new states and properties of matter, phenomena such as superfluidity, the Meissner, the Kondo and the fractional quantum hall effects, have driven the development of new conceptual frameworks for our understanding about collective behavior, the ramifications of which have spread far beyond the confines of terrestrial condensed matter physics- to cosmology, nuclear and particle physics. Here I shall selectively review some of the developments in this field, from the cold-war period, until the present day. I describe how, with the discovery of new classes of collective order, the unfolding puzzles of high temperature superconductivity and quantum criticality, the prospects for major conceptual discoveries remain as bright today as they were more than half a century ago. 1 Emergent Matter: a new Frontier Since the time of the Greeks, scholars have pondered over the principles that govern the universe on its tiniest and most vast scales. The icons that exemplify