The City College of New YorkCCNY
Department of Mathematics
Division of Science

Bose In Boxes

Mathematics Colloquium

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.

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