Seminar
Tuesday, 21 February, 2012
Group Seminar LMU: Visibility of the Higgs mode in condensed matter and ultracold atomic systems
Tuesday, 21.02.2012 10:00 a.m. (s.t.) in H107, Fakultät für Physik LMU
Dr. Daniel Podolsky, Israel Institute of Technology
The Higgs mode is a ubiquitous collective excitation in relativistic systems with broken continuous symmetry. It is expected to appear in antiferromagnets, short coherence length superconductors, charge density waves, and superfluids near the Mott transition. Detection of the mode is a valuable test of the underlying field theory, and its mass gap is a measure of proximity to a quantum critical point. However, since the Higgs mode can decay into low energy Goldstone modes, its experimental visibility has been questioned. I will show that the visibility depends on the symmetry of the measured susceptibility, and will propose experimental setups to observe the Higgs mode across different physical systems.