Duality has a long history in physics going back to the electromagnetic symmetry discovered by Dirac in 1931 and to the duality symmetry of the two-dimensional Ising model of statistical mechanics discovered by Kramers and Wannier in 1941. By now there are many extensions and generalizations of duality in several areas of physics ranging from condensed matter to quantum field theory and gravity. In the talk, I will give a brief sketch of this rich history, focusing on recent discoveries. Duality is often a mapping that relates a strongly coupled theory to another weakly coupled one, often with a seemingly different nature. I will end my colloquium showing that duality has helped in understanding a mysterious symmetry seen in experiments in quantum Hall fluids.
About the speaker: Eduardo Fradkin was born in Buenos Aires (Argentina). He has a Licenciado (Masters) degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires (1973) and a PhD from Stanford University (1979). He has been at the University of Illinois since 1981 where he is the Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. He is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and has worked in the areas of phase diagrams of gauge theories, high temperature superconductors, topological phases of matter and quantum Hall fluids.
This lecture is a part of the program "Condensed Matter meets Quantum Information".