Starts 26 Aug 2025 14:00
Ends 26 Aug 2025 16:00
Central European Time
ICTP Colloquium - Topological physics as censor, and as microscope
Budinich Lecture Hall and Livestreaming
Leonardo Building - Budinich Lecture Hall
Roderich Moessner
(MPI, Germany)
Roderich Moessner is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. After his DPhil in theoretical physics at Oxford University, he was postdoc at Princeton, and held faculty appointments at École normale supérieure in Paris and at Oxford University.
His research interests are in condensed matter and materials physics, especially concerning new and topological forms of order, as well as the study of classical and quantum many-body dynamics in and out of equilibrium. His theoretical discoveries include classical and quantum spin liquids, emergent magnetic monopoles, and non-equilibrium spatiotemporal ordering phenomena. He is recipient of the Leibniz Prize and of the Europhysics Prize.
Abstract:
Topological condensed matter exhibits properties which can be unusually robust to local perturbations. Indeed, this property may make local information very hard to access, a phenomenon that may be called topological censorship. Here, we present two instances where this tension between local and topological physics brings up interesting physical phenomena. One is drawn from quantum Hall physics, where we show that the local distribution of the topologically quantised current flow is continuously tunable between qualitatively different regimes [1]. The other is a topological magnet, in which measurements of the global magnetisation dynamics reveal the appearance of a dynamical fractal and subdiffusion on the lattice scale in a stochiometric material [2].
[1] B. Doucot, D. Kovrizhin, R. M., PNAS 121 (39) e2410703121 (2024)
[2] J. N. Hallen, S. A. Grigera, D. A. Tennant, C. Castelnovo, R.M. Science 378, 1218 (2022)
Light refreshments will be served at the end of the Colloquium on the Leonardo Building Terrace.