Bust of Max Planck

Highlights

Institute's News

Open letter to the residents of Dresden

weiterlesen
Publication Highlights

Global Phase Diagram of a Dirty Weyl Liquid and Emergent Superuniversality

B. Roy et al., Phys. Rev. X 8, 031076 (2018)

Weyl semimetals are exotic materials in which electrons behave more like photons - massless particles moving at a relativistic speed. However, it is unclear how well Weyl semimetals hold on to their bizarre properties in real disordered materials that are littered with impurities. Researchers from MPIPKS in collaboration with Nordita show that for small amounts of disorder such gapless topological semiconductors are stable, but at intermediate disorder these systems can undergo a quantum phase transition into a metallic phase, where electrons cease to behave as relativistic particles. Intriguingly, they discovered that the nature of this continuous transition is insensitive to the many (if not all) details of impurities, a phenomenon commonly referred to as superuniversality, which leaves its signature on the behavior of various observables, such as specific heat and electrical conductivity. These features combined with several other known transitions constitute the global phase diagram of disordered Weyl systems.
weiterlesen
Publication Highlights

Resonance eigenfunction hypothesis for chaotic systems

K. Clauß et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 074101 (2018)

Classical systems with particles escaping through an opening are quantum mechanically described by resonance eigenfunctions. They are for example important for scattering experiments, like emission from optical microcavities, and show fractal patterns which strongly depend on their decay rate. The resonance eigenfunction hypothesis put forward in the paper provides a detailed understanding of this fractal structure. It is based on classical properties of the chaotic dynamics with a new time scale given by the temporal distance to the so-called chaotic saddle. Numerical support is presented for a chaotic map with escape.
weiterlesen
Publication Highlights

Floquet Engineering of Optical Solenoids and Quantized Charge Pumping along Tailored Paths in Two-Dimensional Chern Insulators

Botao Wang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 243602 (2018)

The adiabatic creation of single quasipartices or quasiholes via the insertion of one magnetic flux quantum through an infinitely thin solenoid is a famous gedanken experiment of quantum-Hall physics. In the present paper, physicists from Dresden show how this scenario can be realized in a real experiment with ultracold atoms in optical lattices. For this purpose, they propose a scheme for engineering "optical solenoids", tunable artificial magnetic fields piercing a single plaquette of an optical lattice. Moreover, they investigate how this technique can be used for quantized charge pumping along tailored paths in two dimensional topological Chern insulators.
weiterlesen
Awards and Honors

Biophysicist Frank Jülicher elected for EMBO membership

Frank Jülicher, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS) and the CSBD, is one of 62 outstanding life scientists, that have been elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). With his election, the biophysicist is joining a group of over 1800 EMBO researchers in Europe and around the world.
weiterlesen
Institute's News

New Research Group: Computational Quantum Many-Body Physics

Welcome David Luitz! David heads the new research group "Computational Quantum Many-Body Physics" which will study strongly interacting quantum matter and in particular phenomena that arise due to the presence of many particles. Using computational many-body techniques such as exact diagonalization and tensor network methods, both equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of strongly interacting quantum systems will be investigated, in particular in the context of periodic driving, dissipation and strong disorder.
weiterlesen
Publication Highlights

Driven-Dissipative Supersolid in a Ring Cavity

F. Mivehvar et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 123601 (2018)

Supersolids, a mysterious phase of matter consisting of a crystal which can flow without friction, have been elusive to experimental confirmation till last year, where the first realisations using ultracold atomic systems have been achieved. These atomic implementations however take place in driven-dissipative systems, a situation which lies outside the?thermal equilibrium scenario so far considered in theory.
In this work, we study for the first time the effect of the openness of the system on the main features of a supersolid, and find that its hallmarks can be robust against drive and dissipation whenever the latter preserve spatial translation invariance.
weiterlesen
Institute's News

New Research Group: Mesoscopic Physics of Life

We are glad to announce the arrival of Dr. Christoph A. Weber, who heads the research group ‘Mesoscopic Physics of Life' since March 1, 2018. The group is interested in intra-cellular organisation and aims in particular to understand the role of phase transitions inside cells, including the impact of phase separation and protein aggregation during development and in the context of disease. Further interests are to unravel physical principles underlying the early formation of proto-cells at the origin of life.
weiterlesen
Awards and Honors

Markus Heyl receives the 2018 Bernhard Heß prize

The distinction is awarded to outstanding young scientists by the University of Regensburg. Markus Heyl receives the prize for his contributions to the field of nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems and, in particular, for the development of the theory of dynamical quantum phase transitions. The prize is donated with 2.000 Euro, and the awardees are invited to give a guest lecture at the University of Regensburg.
weiterlesen
Publication Highlights

Universality of clone dynamics during tissue development

S. Rulands et al., Nature Physics (2018)

The development of an organism relies on the tightly orchestrated behavior of many cells. How do these cells self-organize in order to build complex structures like the heart or the brain? To achieve this the fate of these cells must be precisely regulated and understanding the mechanisms of cell fate regulation is key for treating diseases that occur upon dysregulation, such as cancer or diabetes. The fate behaviour of stem and progenitor cells is reflected in the time evolution of their progeny, termed clones, which serve as a key experimental observable. But what can we actually learn from such clones about the processes that regulate their fate during development? Drawing on the results of genetic tracing studies, we show that, despite the complexity of organ development, clonal dynamics may converge to a critical state characterized by universal scaling behaviour of clone sizes. We show how this identification of universal scaling dependences may allow lineage-specific information to be distilled from experiments. Our study shows the emergence of core concepts of statistical physics in an unexpected context, identifying cellular systems as a laboratory to study non-equilibrium statistical physics.
weiterlesen