The two day workshop "PWA90: Emergent Frontiers of Condensed Matter" will be held at Princeton University, 14th-15th December 2013, to bring together world leaders in the area of emergence in condensed and biological matter and to mark the achievements of Professor Philip W. Anderson. The event will frame the grand challenges of emergence that face the community today, combining forward looking research talks and panel discussions with presentations of a historical perspective, examining the areas of physics in which Professor Anderson has made seminal contributions to modern science. Science makes often makes strides by using the perspective and pedagogy of past achievement to provide direction and inspiration for future challenge. This occasion provides an unparalleled opportunity to frame today's frontier challenges in physics, condensed matter and biological matter, providing what is possibly the last opportunity of our science community to commune with Anderson, the co-inventor of the term "Condensed Matter Physics" and one of the great contributors to our modern understanding and the philosophical underpinning of collective, emergent behavior in physics. This event will provide a unique opportunity to summarize the current status of understanding of emergent behavior. The material presented as part of this event will be published as a proceedings with World Scientific, providing a lasting record of a unique research event. The perspective provided by this meeting will help frame the big questions and research in this area for future researchers to push back the frontiers of emergent materials research.
"PWA90: Emergent Frontiers of Condensed Matter" December 13-14th, 2013. Princeton New Jersey. This two day conference was held at Princeton University to bring together world leaders in the area of "Emergence in Condensed Matter" to mark the achievements of Professor Philip W. Anderson. The conference took place over a weekend, in the main auditorium of the new Frick Chemistry building. The meeting was intended to frame the challenges of emergence that face the community today, combining forward-looking research talks and panel discussions with presentations of historical perspectice, examining the areas of physics in which Professor Anderson has made seminal contributions to modern science. The proceedings of the meeting are being published as a volume by World Scientific. The video's of the meeting are arhived at https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/tag/pwa%2090%20physics%20workshop The meeting had six sessions plus two panel discussions. The sessions covered Anderson Localization, the Anderson Higg's effect, Frustrated magnetism and heavy fermions, High temperature superconductivity, Superfluids and Entanglement and Biological physics. On the first day, the session on Anderson localization combined a historical introduction by Elihu Abrahams (UCLA) with a forward looking discussion of modern challenges of many body localization by Boris Altshuler(Columbia University). The session on the Anderson Higg's effect involved two presentations by Edward Witten(Princeton) and Frank Wilczek(MIT) discussing Anderson's contribution to broken symmetry and the Higg's effect from a particle physicists perspective. In the session on frustration and heavy fermions, Patrick Lee(MIT) discussed Anderson's theory of Resonating Valence Bonds for frustrated magnetism. Scott Kirpatrick(Hebrew U, Jerusalem) was unable to attend but has contributed an article on spin glasses to the proceedings. Ali Yazdani(Princeton U) discussed how the development of heavy fermions can now be followed using scanning tunneling spectroscopy. The first day ended with a very animated panel discussion involving Bill Brinkman(former Deputy head of DOE), Walter Kohn (UC Santa Barbara) and former Anderson students, Pierre Morel(former Deputy of French Space Agency) Ted Hsu(Right Honorable MP Kingston Ontario) Joe Wheatley(Managing Director, Biospherica Risk Ltd) and Joe Zhou(Hedge Fund Manager, Taconic Capital), who described how physics helped them into new careers in Space Physics, Canadian Politics, Investment Banking. On the second day, in a session on strongly correlated superconductors, Maurice Rice (ETH, Zurich), Gabi Kotliar (Rutgers), J. C. Campuzano (U. Illinois Chicago) and Mohit Randeria, discussed current progress towards the understanding of high temperature superconductivity. The second session on Superfluids, Entanglement and Biology, involved talks by Albert Libchaber(Rockefeller University) on the problem of self-reproduction, by Anthony Leggett(U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) on the concept of superconducting liquids and Duncan Haldane(Princeton) on topologically entangled matter. In the final session, Mel Rudermann talked about neutron stars, followed by a panel discussion on historical and grand challenges of condensed matter physics in which Erio Tosatti(Sissa, Italy), David Thouless(U. Washington) and T. V. Ramakrishnan(Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) spoke. The meeting was well attended by graduate students from throughout the tri-state area, who were supported by NSF funds. Each talk had a significant amount of time alloted for discussion, which often became quite animated. Anecdotal evidence from students suggests that they were deeply inspired by the talks that took place. OUTCOMES: The proceedings, due to be published in 2015 by World Scientific, contain contributions as follows: PWA90: A Lifetime of Emergence. Forword by the organizers Elihu Abrahams "Some Reminiscences on Anderson Localization" William F Brinkman "A Short History of the Theory and Experimental Discovery of Superfluidity in 3He." Piers Coleman "Phil Andersons Magnetic Life" Ted Geballe and Steven Kivelson: "Paired Insulators and High Temperature Superconductors" Ted Kirkpatrick "Spin Glasses and Frustration" Patrick Lee "40 Years of Quantum Spin Liquid: a Tale of Emergence from Frustration" Anthony Leggett "Superconductivity in a terrestrial liquid: what would it be like?" Albert Libchaber "From bacteria to artificial cells, the problem of self-reproduction" Khandkar Muttalib "Recollections of a Graduate Student" T. V. Ramakrishnan "Anderson and Condensed Matter Physics" Mohit Randeria "High Tc Superconductivity and RVB" Maurice Rice "The Special Properties of High Tc Cuprates , radically different from other Transition Metal Oxides" Daniel Stein "Frustration and Fluctuations in Systems with Quenched Disorder" Frank Wilczek "Superfluidity and Symmetry Breaking -- An Anderson Living Legacy" Edward Witten "Phil Anderson And Gauge Symmetry Breaking" Clare Yu "P. W. Anderson Seen Through the Eyes of a Student"
