Date

26-27 September 2014

Venue

St Catherine's College, Univeristy of Oxford. For directions, please click here.

Organisers

Dima Kovrizhin (TCM Cambridge), Stephen Powell (Nottingham), Andrew Green (LCN/UCL)

Overview

The central task of this workshop is to bring together disparate research communities (statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, cold atoms and quantum information) working on relaxation problems far from equilibrium in classical and quantum systems with the focus on strongly constrained dynamics and glassiness. The long-standing problems in the physics of classical systems with constraints are related to characterisation of their dynamics in approach towards equilibrium, and understanding the properties of possible non-equilibrium steady states. Very similar questions arise in the physics of strongly correlated quantum systems (frustrated quantum magnets, quantum wires, etc.) driven far from equilibrium by an abrupt change of system parameters (quantum quench), or by applied bias voltage.

The goal of the workshop is to identify common points of interest between different communities and explore potential for collaborations, as well as exchange knowledge about approaches to understanding equilibration and to contribute towards development of a common language with a common set of ideas. The outcome of the workshop will be a contribution to the EPSRC roadmap document related to the UK Network on Emergence and Physics far from Equilibrium, and to the development of long-term research agenda within the scope of this Network.

Workshop

We plan to have talks by a limited set of invited speakers, who are world-known leaders in their fields, and whose task is to give a broad (and possibly unbiased) overview on their subject. The talks will be separated by extended discussions and poster sessions, as well as brain-storming.

A provisional programme of the workshop can be found here.