ACQAO theorists’ work highlighted by Physics – spotlighting exceptional research

2 Sep 2010

Exact solutions to the three-body quantum challenge, given recently by Swinburne-ACQAO theorists Liu, Hu and Drummond, attracted a Viewpoint commentary in the prestigious online journal Physics [D. Blume, Physics 3, 74 (2010)]. A Viewpoint in Physics spotlights exceptional research published in American Physical Society journals including Physical Review Letters and Physical Review series. So far there are 204 Viewpoint commentaries highlighting important research works in physics, selected from about 40,000 journal publications in the past two years.

The dynamics of three bodies is a famously insoluble classical problem. Despite this, it is completely soluble in quantum mechanics with local interactions, as shown by Liu, Hu and Drummond in their paper in Physical Review B [Phys. Rev. B 82, 054524 (2010)]. These authors give the first complete solution to the problem of three strongly interacting fermions in two dimensions, together with a companion paper in Physical Review A that treats the three dimensional case [Phys. Rev. A 82, 023619 (2010)]. Experimental quantum systems often have more than three particles. For these cases, Liu et. al. show how their three body results can be used to predict static and dynamic properties of many-body systems at high temperatures. This technique is called the quantum virial expansion, and it agrees extremely well with recent ultra-cold atomic experimental measurements in Paris and Melbourne. As well having direct applications to current ultra-cold atomic physics, this work therefore also gives insight into condensed matter physics questions of strongly interacting electrons, including superconductivity, the quantum Hall effect and ferromagnetism.

The Viewpoint commentary describes this work as ‘an elegant series of papers’, a ‘beautiful contribution that bridges the few-body and many-body worlds’, ‘an important leap’, ‘profound input’, ‘correctly describes the key physics in a quantitative way’, ‘a great deal of insight into the many-body problem’…

For more details, see the webpage, http://physics.aps.org/articles/v3/74

Also see:
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/features/20101708-21243.html
http://www.swinburne.edu.au/magazine/10/189/queen-to-viral-pawn/