Third week Aspen
This is another overdue report about Aspen: last week of my attendance. By the time, topological workshop was more or less gone. On Tuesday ( I missed Monday because of the idiotic hike) I listened to the talk of Amir Jacoby who presented the experimental results about Quantum Hall edges revealed by looking at coupled cleaved edge wires. The system allows to check the tunnel conductance between the wires as function of voltage (energy) and magnetic field between the wires (momentum) and one can read the dispersion curves of edge excitations out of this. Wonderful experiment has shown many featurutes predicted by simple and not-so-simple theories. Amir also told about equlibration of the edge channels in fractional QH regime: I have to read more about this, some data looked quite puzzling.
At the same day there was a collection of 5-minute talks by workshop participants, very informative. I was quite surprised by an idea presented by Netanel Lindner(?): the topological ordering in topological insulators can be punctured as a inflatable ball by applying an a.c. field resonant to the energy band at a line in k- space. I did not believe this at once, and Daniel Arovas was so kind to explain this to me in more detail after the session. There are obvious difficulties with the dissipation and a quantity to observe but this looks like a rich idea.
On Wednesday, Anton Andreev explained his work with Spivak and Kivelson. That is a previously unexplored case of hydrodynamics: somehow, if I got it correctily, thermal conductance of a charged liquid can define its electric conductance. This leads to a rather paradoxical situation I have discussed with Andrei afterwards. I am not sure yet that I understood how this works.
On Thursday, there was a colloquium by Paul Goldbart, a rather complete account of his work on mesososcopic superconductivity, with many references to experiments of Bezryadin. Afterwards I got plastered as I did not do for quite long. Do not think that anything in superconductivity gave me a reason for this: rather, I guess I experienced sadness that Aspen weeks have passed that quick and without immediate results.
With Leonid Glazman, we finally turned to kinetics of SNS and first usage of adiabatic basis. There were rather unexpected difficulties with this, and we become optimistic only on Friday (perhaps because we had to). I still have to summarize these developments in the form of notes.
