Karl Franzens University Graz

Graz University of Technology 

Nonequilibrium Dynamics of Quantum Many Body Systems: from Fundamental Aspects to Material Properties
Prof. Salvatore Manmana
University of Goettingen
16:15 - 17:15 Tuesday 21 October 2025 TUG HS P2

This year celebrates the 100th anniversary of the advent of quantum mechanics, which opened the path to a new and deeper understanding of microscopic physics. Particularly fascinating behavior is obtained, if many quantum mechanical particles interact with each other. In such a situation, quantum entanglement and correlations become important and lead to unconventional phases of matter. In this talk, I will address the quantum dynamics of such many-body systems. Fundamental questions then are, for example, how the quantum mechanical entanglement evolves in time - an abstract quantity, which, however, allowed us to identify a 'temporal quantum phase transition' when letting escape interacting fermions onto an empty lattice. Other aspects touch on the question of how materials evolve when they are excited, for example, with a light pulse. Under periodic driving, new behavior is predicted, which is known as 'Floquet engineering'. I will present recent insights into the behavior of such periodically driven quantum many-body systems.