Clifford V. Johnson
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Southern California
October 5, 2009
The last six years have seen some remarkable phenomena emerging from experimental systems in diverse areas of physics - nuclear, atomic, and condensed matter - over an impressive range of temperatures (from micro Kelvin to several trillion Kelvin - 19 orders of magnitude), densities (26 orders of magnitude), and experimental scales (desktop experiments to giant particle accelerators 4 km around). These experiments have uncovered a new type of behaviour for matter, that appears at extremely strong coupling, in a variety of systems. The traditional techniques for understanding these systems have proven unequal to the task of modelling or predicting many of the properties uncovered. Perturbation theory fails, and various strong coupling techniques also fail. This talk will describe an exciting new set of powerful tools that seem to capture much of the new strongly coupled physics, and may point the way to new phenomena and insights into various important emergent phenomena at strong coupling, such as high-temperature superconductivity and quantum phase transitions.