Cool BEC Colloquium at Berkeley

On the colloquium presented by Kay Kirkpatrick on 10 Sept

The discussion of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and nonlinear Schrödinger equations (NLS) by Kay Kirkpatrick for the 1st colloquium of the 2015/2016 academic year at Berkeley today was excellent. For a non-physicist, she teased out the issues for solutions of the NLS, describing the tension between the Laplacian and non-linear terms, to review recent results on mean field limits and local interactions at very low temperatures. The talk for a general audience included a tight summary of the Hilbert space foundations and notation. Not only did she do the bosenova, but also went some way to addressing Hilbert's 6th problem. The description of that cold phenomena was cool.

Here's a link to the blog by T.Tao on a related talk by Natasa Pavlovic, who was also in the audience. Pavolovic gave a more intensive and research focussed talk at the MSRI last week. T.Tao's blog includes short reviews of classical and quantum mechanics and the NLS: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/from-bose-einstein-condensates-to-the-nonlinear-schrodinger-equation/

Here's a physics magazine article on the bosenova: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/aug/27/cold-atoms-explode-like-cloverleafs

------

DLW
visitor (as non-member) to MSRI, Aug-Sept 2015
See also http://dianewilcox.blogspot.com/2015/08/mindscapes.html