Oases in Hilbert Space

Hilbert spaces are incomprehensibly vast and rich. Model Hamiltonians are spaceships. They could take us to new worlds, such as cold spin liquid oasis, hidden in desert like hot regions of Hilbert space. Using an exact decomposition of spin-half isotropic Heisenberg Hamiltonian on a Honeycomb lattice into a sum of 3 non-commuting (permuted) Kitaev Hamiltonians, we build a degenerate manifold of metastable flux free Kitaev quantum spin liquid vacua and vector Fermionic (Goldstone like) collective modes. Our method, symmetric decomposition of Hamiltonians, will help explore nonexotic manybody systems, and design exotic quasi-quantum scars (effective T=0 metastable phases, above true ground state)  and exotic quasi particles. Cold atom experiments could help us get a glimpse of 'Oases in Hilbert Space'.

About the speaker

Prof. Baskaran is a distinguished theoretical physicist known for his contribution to condensed matter physics. He is an Emeritus Professor at IMSc, Chennai, and a distinguished professor at IIT Madras. He also holds a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter Institute, Canada. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1990 and was the first recipient of the ICTP prize in 1983.