Events

"Duality and the fractional quantum Hall regime: open questions and new results"

Landau’s idea of broken symmetry plays a central role in our understanding of phases of matter. The fractional quantum Hall effect, which ushered in the era of topology and fractionalization in the laboratory, represents one of the few known cases where Landau’s broken symmetry paradigm breaks down. Traditionally requiring large magnetic fields, such fractionalization has recently been observed even in the absence of magnetic fields.

In this talk, I review some longstanding experimental enigmas associated with quantized Hall phases and their phase transitions, which require non-perturbative theoretical approaches. I will then describe such a framework at an intuitive level, and survey how it gives us new ways of thinking about unresolved experimental phenomena.