1:30 pm MCP 201
The quantum mechanics of a perfect fluid.
Finite density systems can be described by effective field theories with non-linearly realized space-time symmetries, whose construction resembles that of the QCD chiral lagrangian. Based on that similarity, one would expect the construction to work equally well classically and quantum mechanically. While that is true for superfluids and solids, one instead finds that for genuine fluids things are made more complicated by the unusual dynamics of their transverse modes, which are not described by a Fock space. Focussing on the incompressible limit for a fluid in 2+1 dimensions, I illustrate its analogy with the ordinary rigid body. Indeed both systems describe motion on a group manifold. Proceeding from this analogy I develop a consistent quantum mechanical description of a perfect fluid using the known equivalence between the area preserving diffeomorfism group in 2D and SU(N) for N->\infty.