July 29, 2013 – August 10, 2013

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Location

Weihai, Shandong Province, China

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Photo Credits:skyscrapercity.com,www.gordongould.tumblr.com,www.abb.iopconfs.org,skyscrapercity.com

Organizers

Hong Ding, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Xi Dai, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Ming Li, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Xin-Cheng Xie, Peking University 
Qi-Kun Xue, Tsinghua University

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Important Links
ICAM-China Summer School Website
Registration Form (deadline: June 30, 2013)
Presentations from School

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Overview

In the last twenty years, there has been tremendous progress in condensed matter physics; the development of many new concepts has provided a brand new perspective on emergent phenomena emerging in condensed matter systems. For example, phases in condensed matter are traditionally defined by their symmetry and phase transitions occur when there are changes in symmetry. However, recently there is more and more research interest in the “topological phases” of condensed matter, where the phase is defined not by its symmetry but via the topology of its electronic structure. Therefore the topological phase is a new concept in condensed matter. Another example is the concept of entanglement, which comes from the superposition principle of Quantum mechanics and measures the complicity of a wave function.

 

Although all these new concepts are very commonly used in the cutting edge research works of condensed matter, they are still too new to be included in the standard textbooks for graduate students. The main purpose of this summer school is to fill the gap between the graduate courses taken in the school and the cutting edge research of modern condensed matter physics. The summer school will be specially designed for the first or second year graduate students, who just start their PhD studies in condensed matter physics. We are going to include the following contents in this summer school, i) The topological aspects in the condensed matter physics, which including the concept of Berry phase, the topological orders and the topological classifications of the states in condensed matter; ii) The concept of quantum entanglement and its application in both quantum information and many-body theory.