Speaker: Karl Landsteiner
Affiliation: IFT, (UAM-CSIC)
Date: Tuesday, 24 January 2017 at 11:00
Location: Seminar Room, Serrano 121 (CFMAC)
The concept of symmetry is one cornerstone of modern theoretical physics,
quantum mechanics is another. Sometimes they are incompatible with each other.
These incompatibilities are called anomalies.
They constrain possible fermion spectra of gauge theories and explain otherwise
forbidden processes such as the decay of the neutral pion into two photons.
In the recent years however anomalies play an ever bigger role in a totally different
realm of physics: condensed matter. In particular anomalies induce exotic new
transport phenomena such as the chiral magnetic and the chiral vortical effects.
I will review of chiral anomalies, anomaly induced transport phenomena and
discuss some of its applications in a new exciting class of materials: the Weyl semimetals.