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Colloquium: Superfluidity/superconductivity: their defeat, fluctation, and respect to U(1) symmetry

ABSTRACT

Superfluidity and its charged counterpart superconductivity are fascinating quantum phenomena that defy common sense of fluid in macroscopic scale. This talk will introduce their basic properties and the underlying simple physics, followed by a few related topics: 1) realization of a new Bose liquid ground state (the first homogeneous Bose metal) by defeating superfluidity, 2) discovery of a universal fluctuation in modern unconventional superconductors, and 3) rectification of serious flaws in standard descriptions employing spontaneously broken U(1) symmetry, which led to the false promise of braiding quantum information via Bogoliubov zero modes. (c.f. Majorana 1 of Microsoft)

 

BIOGRAPHY

Professor KU Wei graduated from Tamkang University in Taiwan in 1991 and obtained his Ph.D. from University of Tennessee in Knoxville TN, USA in 2000. After a term of PostDoc in UC Davis, he joined the theoretical physics staff in Brookhaven National Laboratory with an Adjunct Professor appointment in Stony Brook University in 2003. Since 2016, he has been a Zhiyuan Professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University through the National Qianren Program and serves as the T.D. Lee Professor and deputy director at the Lee Institute. Combining innovative algorithms with analytic methods, Prof. Ku has made a series of pioneering works on strongly correlated functional materials and unconventional high-Tc superconductivity. His highly insightful results are welcomed by experimentalists working in the challenging frontier areas of condensed matter physics.

Event Details
Speaker
Prof. Wei KU
Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 

Date & Time
14 Jan 2026 @ 2:00PM

Venue
Y5-302, Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, CityUHK

Chair
Prof. Wei BAO
weibo@cityu.edu.hk