Niels Bohr Lecture by professor Ramamurti Shankar

The royal road to Landau's Fermi liquid

Ramamurti Shankar

Ramamurti Shankar is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Yale University.

Abstract: Decades ago Landau, using his unsurpassed intuition, invented a scheme for describing interacting non-relativisitc fermions, which goes by the name Landau's Fermi liquid. More recently this picture was rediscovered by applying the renormalization group of Kadanoff and Wilson to this problem, making it more accessible to mortals and readily amenable to generalizations, which is important now that Landau is no longer here to help us. 

In this talk I will provide the audience a gentle introduction to the fermion problem, the renormalization group as applied here,  and the natural emergence of the Fermi liquid as the solution. 

This will be a blackboard talk hopefully accessible to a wide audience. 

  • AUD. 3 at HCØ, May 30, 2018 at 15:15

As usual, coffee, tea and cookies will be served in front of the auditorium at 14:55.

About Ramamurti Shankar

Ramamurti Shankar is the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Yale University. After receiving his B Tech from IIT Madras  in 1969, he got his PhD in elementary particle physics from University of California,  Berkeley in 1974. He was a Harvard Junior Fellow between1974-77. He then joined Yale physics department, which he chaired between 2001-2007. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his contributions to teaching he won the Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize at  Yale and the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society for  “Innovative applications of field theoretic techniques to quantum condensed matter systems”. 

He has written five books: Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Basic Training in Mathematics, Fundamentals of Physics I and II and Quantum Field Theory and Condensed Matter. His yearlong course on introductory physics is available on line at Yale or Youtube, iTunes etc.