Speaker: Juan Manuel Pérez Pardo
Affiliation: Dpto. de Matemáticas, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Date: Wednesday, 30 November 2016 at 14:00
Location: Seminar Room, Serrano 121 (CFMAC)
Quantum field theories can be used to construct effective modells to describe condensed matter systems. One of the main differences between condensed matter systems and fundamental particle physics is that, in the former, the materials where the effective field theory lives are of finite size and have boundaries. This difference is crucial and brings extra features like the appearance of edge states.
I will show that the appearance of edge states is related with the type of boundary conditions describing the effective model and the difficulties that might arise when one considers different boundary conditions. For doing that I will consider two different situations, scalar theories and fermionic theories. Surprisingly, in the latter case, there is a threshold size for the sample below which the edge states disappear.