First week Aspen

Aspen does not appear to be a good place for blogging: the second week is almost over, yet I still have to write about the first week. 

Aspen Center for Physics is certainly a good place for doing science: it hosts many workshops during summer, and a bunch of people communicating, writting formulas, listening to talks, making fun and hiking in nearby mountains. There are two workshops going simultaneously: Low Dimensional Topological Matter (here matter as in consensed matter not as in matter of routine) and Quantum Many-Body Physics in One Dimension. According to traditional classification, most participants belong to strongly correlated community, to more theoretical and abstract part of it. While it’s not precisely my community, I certainly enjoy intellectual intensity and logical taste of their discussions, something I sometimes miss in quantum transort. I could listen to a talk not understanding a bit and still find it interesting and inspiring. 

As to talks, we,ve got plenty for workshops of the style. Yuval Oreg told about Creating and braiding of 1D non Abelian Majoranas (that is, 1d superconductor with spin-orbit in polarizing magnetic field). Thierry Giamarchi discussed Non-Luttinger liquids (that is, cold atom chains). Alexey Bezryadin has reported his quest for phase-slips in 1d superconducting wires. Jay Deep Sau told about  Majorana fermions and non-Abelian statistics at the interface of ordinary semiconductor and superconductors (that is, polarized superconductor again).

I could not escape entaglement over here, of course. Daniel Arovas gave a colloquium on that in complicated many-body states. I was surprised by abundance of the results he reviewed. Besides, I discussed the stuff with Israel Klych and Karyn Le Hur: they also did a work on Renyi entropies and their relation to full counting statistics.

Alina and Ciprian were kind enough to send me frequent progress reports about our projects, so I do not feel guilty for letting them alone without my valuable supervision. 

My personal interest is in collaboration with Leonid Glazman, we go on with the stuff I described in Grenoble. The progress is slow, and we encounter many strange things not fitting our plans, but we do not give up. It’s like a difficult hike without a good map.

As to hikes, I wish I could enjoy them as usual. My last time in Aspen was four years ago. When I get to a familiar Ute trail, I’ve clearly understood that that time I was four years younger. I could not make it to the top of Aspen mountain… Providence was so much displeased with my hiking performance as to dispatch a truck with a good Samaritan of driver: he brought me down to the town saving me from hiking back in darkness. Another attempt was to bike to Snowmass village: again, I was dissappointed with my performance, though I could breath normally at least a third of the way. Looks like I could not adopt to height during the whole week.

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