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Abstract:

During the last decade a host of experiments has established the existence of highly unconventional states of matter in a variety of low dimensional quantum systems. These include equilibrium states characterized by topological properties as well as stationary states in out of equilibrium situations. Both of these give access to hitherto unexplored areas of many-body quantum physics. The key aim of the workshop was to bring together experts in several different research areas revolving around novel quantum states of matter.

Abstract:

We experimentally study the viscous fingering instability in a fluid-fluid phase separated colloid-polymer mixture by means of laser scanning confocal microscopy and microfluidics. We focus on three aspects of the instability. (i) The interface between the two demixed phases has an ultralow surface tension, such that we can address the role of thermal interface fluctuations. (ii) We image the interface in three dimensions allowing us to study the interplay between interface curvature and flow. (iii) The displacing fluid wets all walls completely, in contrast to traditional viscous fingering experiments, in which the displaced fluid wets the walls. We also perform lattice Boltzmann simulations, which help to interpret the experimental observations. © 2013 The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Abstract:

We consider the time evolution after quantum quenches in the spin-1/2 Heisenberg XXZ quantum spin chain with Ising-like anisotropy. The time evolution of short-distance spin-spin correlation functions is studied by numerical tensor network techniques for a variety of initial states, including Néel and Majumdar-Ghosh states and the ground state of the XXZ chain at large values of the anisotropy. The various correlators appear to approach stationary values, which are found to be in good agreement with the results of exact calculations of stationary expectation values in appropriate generalized Gibbs ensembles. In particular, our analysis shows how symmetries of the post-quench Hamiltonian that are broken by particular initial states are restored at late times.