Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC)

Latest Episodes:

Identifying the Time Scales in Electron-Positron Production from Ultra-Strong Electric Fields Jun 10, 2026

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Electron-positron pair production in ultra-strong electric fields, the Sauter-Schwinger effect, is a long-standing theoretical prediction. In this talk the Sauter-Schwinger effect will be introduced and the related field-strength and energy scales as well as the possibility to verify this effect in upcoming multi-petawatt laser facilities will be discussed. The Dirac-Heisenberg-Wigner formalism provides a fully Poincaré-covariant, non-perturbative phase space description of the Sauter-Schwinger effect, and therefore its key quantities will be introduced. Some respective numerical results will be shown and discussed. An interpretation of a particle distribution at finite (non-asymptotic) times will be provided via a Gedankenexperiment. This in turn enables one to isolate and, therefore, identify the relevant time scales of particle formation. The resulting generic aspects for particle creation in quantum physics beyond perturbation theory will be elucidated.

The protein doctors: how chaperons repair damaged proteins Jun 10, 2026

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The life of a protein, from birth till death, is complex and challenging. At times, because of stresses or bad luck, it might take the wrong conformation and start aggregating. This process is intrinsic to the physics of proteins, and life has had to cope with it since its early days. The solution devised by evolution comes in the form of chaperone protein, a broad class of machines, present in all organisms on Earth, that repair conformationally damaged proteins, making them functional again, at an energy cost. In this talk I will provide a view of our present understanding of the molecular mechanism of function of Hsp70, possibly the most central of all chaperones, and of its consequences on proteins.

The Underlying Scaling Laws and Universal Statistical Structure of Complex Datasets Jun 10, 2026

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We study universal traits which emerge both in real-world complex datasets, as well as in artificially generated ones. Our approach is to analogize data to a physical system and employ tools from statistical physics and Random Matrix Theory (RMT) to reveal their underlying structure. We focus on the feature-feature covariance matrix, analyzing both its local and global eigenvalue statistics. Our main observations are: (i) The power-law scalings that the bulk of its eigenvalues exhibit are vastly different for uncorrelated random data compared to real-world data, (ii) this scaling behavior can be completely recovered by introducing long range correlations in a simple way to the synthetic data, (iii) both generated and real-world datasets lie in the same universality class from the RMT perspective, as chaotic rather than integrable systems, (iv) the expected RMT statistical behavior already manifests for empirical covariance matrices at dataset sizes significantly smaller than those conventionally used for real-world training, and can be related to the number of samples required to approximate the population power-law scaling behavior, (v) the Shannon entropy is correlated with local RMT structure and eigenvalues scaling, and substantially smaller in strongly correlated datasets compared to uncorrelated synthetic data, and requires fewer samples to reach the distribution entropy. These findings can have numerous implications to the characterization of the complexity of data sets, including differentiating synthetically generated from natural data, quantifying noise, developing better data pruning methods and classifying effective learning models utilizing these scaling laws.

The Nobel Prizes in Physics in 1932/33: Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac Jun 10, 2026

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The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 was awarded to Raman for the discovery of the effect named after him. The next time physics prizes were announced was in November 1933, which makes this the longest peace-time gap in the history of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Considering that the 1932 year’s prize was awarded in 1933 to Heisenberg and the 1933 year’s prize to Schrödinger and Dirac for their contributions to the new quantum mechanics, this gap is the more puzzling. I will describe, based on archive material, the struggle facing the Nobel Committee during those years, and how it eventually arrived at a name combination comprising three of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century. I will also describe briefly the three Nobel Prizes concerning quantum mechanics that followed later, in 1945, 1954 and 2022.

Modern aspects of quantum physics and topology Jun 10, 2026

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Topology is one of the most recent branches of mathematics and has entered fully into the most modern aspects of theoretical physics: quantum computation. In this colloquium an elementary approach to the role of topology in quantum physics and its implications for exotic states of quantum matter is provided. Topology helps to solve the essential problem of quantum computation: to battle its fragility in order to benefit from its enormous potential possibilities. After showing topological color codes and their experimental realization, future challenges are addressed by fracton models involving the discovery of new quantum phases of matter beyond the well-known topological phases that were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016.

Positivity constraints on theory space Jun 10, 2026

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The bootstrap program leverages symmetry and positivity to carve out the space of consistent quantum theories. In this talk I will highlight some of its recent successes, ranging from the numerical solution of statistical models at criticality to universal constraints on quantum gravity.

The erasure of topological defects and the saturation phenomenon Jun 10, 2026

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Interesting erasure phenomena arise from interactions between lower-dimensional and higher-dimensional objects and impact cosmology and fundamental physics. In the first part of the colloquium, I will examine the case for topological defects, revealing insights into the interactions of magnetic monopoles, cosmic strings, and domain walls. For objects like cosmic or QCD flux strings, encounters with domain walls or D-branes result in erasure through coherence loss during collisions, introducing a new string break-up mechanism. The collisions between magnetic monopoles and domain walls in an SU(2) gauge theory lead to monopole erasure, which is pivotal in post-inflationary phase transitions and potentially solves the cosmological monopole problem. Simulations show that strings or monopoles cannot penetrate domain walls. Entropy-based arguments highlight the significance of the erasure phenomena that can produce correlated gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation, impacting cosmology and astrophysics. The second part of the colloquium focuses on the saturation of unitarity and the emergence of Saturons. These self-sustained objects, which reach the maximal entropy allowed by unitarity, resemble black holes. I discuss a "black hole-saturon" correspondence in a renormalizable SU(N) invariant theory. Despite lacking gravity, saturons show features like an information horizon, Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, thermal evaporation, and a characteristic information retrieval time. This correspondence has significant implications for black hole physics and saturated systems. We will examine recent results on saturon mergers, vortices in black holes, and primordial black holes, offering new perspectives on fundamental theory and observations.

Anomalous metals Jun 10, 2026

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The observation of metallic ground states in a variety of two-dimensional electronic systems poses a fundamental challenge for the theory of electron fluids. I will analyze evidence for the existence of a regime, which we call the “anomalous metal regime," in diverse 2D superconducting systems driven through a quantum superconductor to metal transition by tuning physical parameters such as the magnetic field, the gate voltage in the case of systems with a MOSFET geometry, or the degree of disorder. The principal phenomenological observation is that in the anomalous metal, as a function of decreasing temperature, the resistivity first drops as if the system were approaching a superconducting ground state, but then saturates at low temperatures to a value that can be orders of magnitude smaller than the Drude value. The anomalous metal also shows a giant positive magneto-resistance. This behavior is observed in a broad range of parameters. I will exhibit, by theoretical solution of a model of superconducting grains embedded in a metallic matrix, that as a matter of principle such anomalous metallic behavior can occur in the neighborhood of a quantum superconductor-metal transition. However, I will also argue that the robustness and ubiquitous nature of the observed phenomena are difficult to reconcile with any existing theoretical treatment and speculate about the character of a more fundamental theoretical framework.

Structured Vacuum Fluctuations: A New Pathway to Quantum Materials Design within QEDFT Jun 10, 2026

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An appealing and challenging route towards engineering materials with specic properties is to find ways of designing or selectively manipulate materials, especially at the quantum level. We will provide an overview of how well-established concepts in the fields of quantum chemistry and materials have to be adapted when the quantum nature of light becomes important. We will pursue the question whether it is possible to create these new states of materials as groundstates of the system. To this end we will show how the emerging (vaccum) dressed states resembles Floquet states in driven systems. A particular appeal of light dressing is the possibility to engineer symmetry breaking which can lead to novel properties of materials, e.g coupling to circularly polarized photons leads to local breaking of time-reversal symmetry enabling the control over a large variety of materials properties (e.g.topology). We show that the new quantum electrodynamics density-functional formalism (QEDFT) can acocunt for those effects. We illustrate the realisation of those ideas in molecular complexes and 2D materials.

New developments in supermembrane theory Jun 10, 2026

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The (unique) maximally extended D=11 supermembrane theory stands out as a candidate for the non-perturbative unification of superstring theory. In this talk I will review some basic features, in particular the light-cone gauge reformulation of the theory as the N-->\infty limit of the maximally supersymmetric SU(N) matrix model, and present new evidence for the existence of the N-->\infty limit, using a path integral formulation. I will also touch on several open issues, such as the construction of supermembrane vertex operators.

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