Bose In Boxes
Time and place
12:20 PM on Thursday, September 15th, 2016; NAC 6/113
Persi Diaconis (Stanford University)
Abstract
Bose-Einstein condensation is a fascinating physical phenomenon. At the same time, at least in the non-interacting case considered by Einstein, it's only "balls in boxes." In joint work with Chatterjee and Soundararajan, we use number theoretic "partition identity" methods to give new results about the fluctuations of the condensate. This raises fresh questions about the spectrum of Schrödinger operators and exposes the frailty of the physicists' tool of "equivalence of ensembles." No previous physics knowledge needed. After all, it's just balls in boxes.
