Giovanni Vignale is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1979 and gaining his PhD at Northwestern University in 1984, he worked as a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 

He joined the Physics Department at the University of Missouri in 1988 and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997. He has been a visiting scientist at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; a member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, an Ikerbasque Fellow at the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility in San Sebastian, Spain, and a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Solid State Physics of the University of Tokyo.
He is currently Visiting Research Professor at the Institute for Intelligent Functional Materials (I-FIM), National University of Singapore.

Giovanni Vignale’s area of research is the many-body theory of electronic materials and devices — a field in which he has more than 200 papers in print.  He is author of two books “Quantum Theory of the Electron Liquid”  (Cambridge University Press, 2005)  (with G. F. Giuliani) and,  “The Beautiful Invisible – Imagination, Creativity and Theoretical Physics” (Oxford University Press, 2011.)

ABSTRACT:
Electric and thermal transport in electronic systems has long been described in terms of an independent-particle picture (Landau theory of Fermi liquids) which emphasizes the role of collisions between electrons and impurities or lattice vibrations, with electron-electron collisions playing a secondary role. It is only in the past two decades that advances in the fabrication of ultra clean samples have refocused the interest on collective hydrodynamic transport - a transport regime which is controlled by the nearly conserved quantities: particle number, momentum, and energy density, and by electron-electron interactions tying their values together.  In this talk I review some of the recent theoretical and experimental progress in our understanding of electronic hydrodynamics in graphene-based materials. Several novel effects have been predicted and experimentally observed, including large deviations from the conventional Wiedemann-Franz law, which connects the electric and thermal conductivities.  I then move on to other realizations of hydrodynamic concepts, namely in Fermionic cold atoms and in the quark-gluon plasma of quantum chromodynamics.  In the latter case I review the theoretical arguments, based on holographic duality and supported by experiment, which suggests that the quark-gluon plasma should be an almost perfect fluid, with a viscosity to entropy ratio close to a conjectured lower bound ℏ⁄(4πk_B ), which, quite surprisingly, is also approached by electrons in pristine graphene.

This is an in person event, taking place in the Budinich Lecture Hall @ ICTP.
Livestreaming will be available from the ICTP YouTube account.

Light refreshments will be served after the event.
All are welcome to attend.