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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
As was emphasized by Feynman ... among others, the physics of superfluidity lies not in the presence of gapless excitations, but in the paucity of gapless excitations. (After all, the Fermi liquid has a continuum of gapless modes.) There are too few modes that the superfluid can lose energy and momentum to.
We discuss the problem of adding random matrices, which enable us to study Hamiltonians consisting of a deterministic term plus a random term. Using a diagrammatic approach and introducing the concept of "gluon connectedness," we calculate the density of energy levels for a wide class of probability distributions governing the random term, thus generalizing a result obtained recently by Brézin, Hikami, and Zee. The method used here may be applied to a broad class of problems involving random matrices.
... the fight for credit goes on in every field, but in theoretical physics, it is almost a way of life, since ideas are by nature ethereal. And the stakes are high: the victor gets to go to Stockholm, while the loser is consigned to the dustbin of history; a history largely written by the victor with the help of an army of idolaters and science writers.
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