Celebrating Boltzmann | A seminar by the physicist Immanuel Bloch on Tuesday 20 February at SISSA, Via Bonomea 265

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Dear All,

The Statistical Physics Group at SISSA will launch next week the 
/Boltzmann Lecture/, an event to celebrate the Austrian physicist on his 
birthday. An outstanding guest, the physicist Immanuel Bloch, will start 
the initiative with the talk entitled “Using Ultracold Quantum Gases to 
Probe New and Old Frontiers of Statistical Physics.”

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann, born in Wien on 20 February, is considered the 
founding father of statistical physics. He developed the probabilistic 
laws that explain the physical properties of matter and the concepts of 
entropy and irreversibility. The /Boltzmann Lecture/ is a project 
promoted by the group of Statistical Physics at SISSA and, in 
particular, by the coordinator Pasquale Calabrese and Giuseppe Mussardo, 
author of the documentary film “Boltzmann. The genius of disorder” (2006).

During the first lecture, next Tuesday, at 11 am in room 128-129, 
Immanuel Bloch will address one of the fundamental questions in 
statistical physics: how to conciliate the laws of quantum mechanics for 
a macroscopic system – which predict a memory of the initial state of 
the system – with the familiar irreversible phenomena that bring any 
extended system to a thermal equilibrium, where all memory of the 
initial state is lost. Bloch has led outstanding experiments on this 
crucial theme. During his talk, he will present a series of new results 
on cold atom quantum systems made of mixtures of fermions, which lead to 
a physical phenomenon known as /Many Body Localization Transition/. 
Moreover, he will discuss the possibility to realize quantum systems 
with negative temperature in the laboratory.

Immanuel Bloch is Scientific Director and Managing Director of the Max 
Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany. He completed his 
PhD in 2000 working with Theodor W. Hänsch (2005 Nobel Prize in Physics) 
at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. Bloch moved to a full 
professor position in 2003, when he was only 31 years old. For his 
outstanding work on quantum many-body system studied by means ultracold 
atomic quantum gases on optical lattices he received many prizes and 
awards, including the European Physical Society Prize in 2011 for 
Fundamental Aspects of Quantum Electronics and Optics, the 2013 Körber 
European Science Prize and the 2015 Harvey Prize from Israel Technion 
Institute.

Chiara Saviane, PhD
Media Relations and Communications Unit
SISSA - Trieste
Tel: +39 040 3787230 Cell: +39 333 7675962
web: www.sissa.it <http://www.sissa.it>

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