Dresden 2006 – scientific programme

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SYSF: Superfluidity

SYSF 1: Superfluidity 1

SYSF 1.3: Invited Talk

Monday, March 27, 2006, 10:45–11:15, HSZ 04

From superfluids to vacuum of relativistic quantum fields — •Grigory Volovik — Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O.Box 2200, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland — Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, 119334 Moscow, Russia

The phenomenon of emergent physical laws, which is manifested in most of the condensed-matter systems, is becoming the paradigm of the modern physics. We hope that this phenomenon can be also applicable to the high energy physics and gravity. The encouraging fact comes from universal properties of the ground states of quantum liquids, which play the role of the quantum vacua in particle physics. The role of matter is played by the fermion zero modes and by the bosonic collective modes of the liquid. There are only two basic universality classes of quantum vacua, which support the topologically stable gapless (massless) fermions. The more common class contains the vacua whose fermionic excitations live in the vicinity of the Fermi surface. Fermionic excitations in vacua belonging to the second class live near Fermi points – points in momentum space where the energy of excitation is zero. Near Fermi points, excitations behave as relativistic massless Weyl fermions, while the bosonic collective modes interacting with them simulate the gauge and gravitational fields. In this universality class the gauge fields, chiral fermions, Lorentz invariance, gravity, relativistic spin, and other features of Standard Model gradually emerge. The condensed-matter vacua demonstrate the possible solution of the cosmological problem: the huge contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields is cancelled without any fine tuning by microscopic degrees of freedom above the Planck cut-off.