Waves, Vortices and Superfluids

The Consulate General of France in Vancouver has partnered with the Peter Wall Institute to bring leading French scholars to participate in dialogue with their Canadian counterparts.
Abstract:In his famous lectures, R. P. Feynman highlights the deep unity of physics and the analogies existing between sometimes vastly different physical systems. In the same spirit, Dr. Chevy will demonstrate how the tools and concepts inherited from classical hydrodynamics can be used to explain the quantum world. As an example, he will show that the same phenomena govern the physics of water-walking insects and that of laser-cooled superfluid vapours.
Speaker:Frédéric Chevy is a Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure and at Ecole Polytechnique. He did his PhD at Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel on the study of quantum vortices in laser-cooled Bose-Einstein condensates. After his postdoc on soft-condensed matter, he joined the ultracold Fermi group at Ecole Normale Supérieure where he works on the properties of strongly interacting quantum systems and the connection between quantum and classical hydrodynamics. He was appointed junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France and in 2011 was awarded an ERC consolidator grant for the study of ultracold atoms (Projet ThermoDynaMix).
UBC Host: Prof. Kirk Madison, Dept. of Physics and AstronomyHennings Building, Room 201 – 6224 Agricultural Road, Vancouver