This award provides funding for an RUI research project carried out by Professor Dimitra Karabali at the Lehman College campus of the City University of New York (CUNY).
In quantum field theory, there is no such thing as a true vacuum: there are always zero-point fluctuations in which particle/anti-particle pairs are produced and then annihilated. The Casimir effect refers to a phenomenon whereby the dynamics of the vacuum itself produces a measurable effect, namely a force. Thus, studies of the Casimir effect are direct probes of the underlying features of quantum field theory. As part of her research, Professor Karabali will continue her studies of the Casimir effect in a variety of settings and under a variety of physical conditions. She will also continue her work to develop a Hamiltonian approach towards studying non-perturbative phenomena in Yang-Mills theories, such as confinement and the existence of a mass gap.
This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Specifically, it will play an important role in fostering an active, scientifically oriented research environment at Lehman College, CUNY, a predominantly undergraduate institution with a large number of minority students, designated as a Hispanic serving institution by the U.S. Department of Education. It will also support collaboration between the high-energy theory research groups at Lehman and at City College, CUNY.
The project outcomes are concentrated in two main areas: Casimir effect and hydrodynamical descriptions of many-body systems. Casimir effect refers to the phenomenon where quantum fluctuations of fields produce a macroscopic force between neutrally charged objects in vacuum. These forces, although small, can now be experimentally measured and play an important role in the design of nano-scale mechanical devices. The PI and collaborators developed a new analytical approach to study diffractive corrections to the Casimir effect in geometries with edges and apertures under general boundary conditions. Many-body physical systems can rarely be described in terms of dynamics at the microscopic level. Effective descriptions that capture important collective properties of such systems have been developed. In recent work the PI and collaborators used effective hydrodynamical approaches to describe diverse properties of many-body fermion systems: a) One such approach, the so-called `droplet’ bosonization method, was used to describe the dynamics of a dense collection of fermions forming a constant density distribution in phase space, in terms of deformations of the boundary of this `droplet’. Our work shows that this effective description can be exact in one-dimension, including interactions. It further demonstrates interesting collective behavior and phase transitions, and has the potential to be generalized to higher dimensions. b) Another collaborative work resulted in the hydrodynamic description of the dynamics of relativistic fluids made of particles carrying charge and spin degrees of freedom in the presence of external electromagnetic fields. This provides a framework for magnetohydrodynamics of plasmas made of spinning particles and in particular the description of phenomena such as spin-orbit interactions and spin precession in fluids, and can have important applications in a variety of systems. These project outcomes resulted from a collaboration between the high energy groups at Lehman and City College, CUNY. This research project has contributed towards the training of graduate students and has played an important role in fostering an active research environment at Lehman College, CUNY, a predominantly undergraduate institution with a large number of minority students.
