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The goal of condensed matter physics is to understand the various states of matter. States of matter are characterized by the presence (or absence) o… - Anthony Zee
" "The goal of condensed matter physics is to understand the various states of matter. States of matter are characterized by the presence (or absence) of order: a ferromagnet becomes ordered below the transition temperature. In the Landau-Ginzburg theory ... , order is associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, described naturally with group theory. Girvin and MacDonald first noted that the order in Hall fluids does not really fit into the Landau-Ginzburg scheme: We have not broken any obvious symmetry. The topological property of the Hall fluids provides a clue to what is going on. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ground state degeneracy of a Hall fluid depends on the topology of the manifold it lives on, a dependence group theory is incapable of accounting for. Wen has forcefully emphasized that the study of topological order, or more generally quantum order, may open up a vast new vista on the possible states of matter.
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About Anthony Zee
Anthony Zee (, b. 1945) (Zee comes from the Shanghainese pronunciation of 徐) is a Chinese-American physicist and author.
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Alternative Names:
Xu Yihong
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Additional quotes by Anthony Zee
We show that the introduction of a charged scalar particle into the standard theory leads to numerous phenomenological consequences. In particular, muon-neutrino scattering on electron can resonate in the s-channel, a fact which is potentially important in high-energy neutrino experiments and conceivably relevant in explaining the recently reported underground muon events from Cygnus X-3. We focus on the violation of various quantum numbers, including electron, muon, and tauon numbers.
Rotations in 3-dimensional Euclidean space ... form the poster child of group theory and are almost indispensable in physics. Think of rotating a rigid object, such as a bust of Newton. After two rotations in succession, the bust, being rigid, has not been deformed in any way; it merely has a different orientation. Thus, the composition of two rotations is another rotation.
Electromagnetism becomes stronger as we go to higher energies, or equivalently shorter distances.
Physically, the origin of this phenomenon is closely related to the physics of dielectrics. Consider a photon interacting with an electron, which we will call the test electron to avoid confusion in what follows. Due to quantum fluctuations ... , spacetime is full of electron-positron pairs, popping in and out of existence. Near the test electron, the electrons in these virtual pairs are repelled by the test electron and thus tend to move away from the test electron while the positrons tend to move toward the test electron. Thus, at long distances, the charge of the test electron is shielded to some extent by the cloud of positrons, causing a weaker coupling to the photon, while at short distances the coupling to the photon becomes stronger. The quantum vacuum is just as much a dielectric as a lump of actual material.
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