Morse Theory and van Hove Singularities - part 2
Morse Theory and van Hove Singularities - part 2
- Event time: 11:30am
- Event date: 11th December 2013
- Speaker: Chay Paterson (Formerly School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
The local behaviour of a certain class of differentiable functions obeys strong constraints due to the global topology of their domain, with several important implications for dispersion relations in solid-state physics, for which periodic boundary conditions require reciprocal space to have a nontrivial global topology. This talk should provide a physically intuitive overview of Morse Theory, the mathematics underlying the surprising connection of global topology to local behaviour, and the striking experimental predictions of van Hove singularities, a phenomenon in crystallographic optical absorption spectra.
The content will be less biophysical/soft matter than usual and more oriented towards analytic solid state theory, and also may also be interesting to particle theorists.
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