Few-Body Physics in a Many Body World

Talk

A central challenge in quantum physics is understanding how complex, emergent behavior arises from microscopic interactions. In this talk, I present a bottom-up perspective in which few-body correlations provide a route to uncovering and controlling many-body phenomena across systems ranging from ultracold gases to two-dimensional materials. I will address three guiding questions: How is few-body binding modified in a quantum-degenerate environment? How do few-body correlations reshape many-body phases? And how can the interplay between few- and many-body physics be used to characterize correlated quantum states?

I will show how these rich phenomena can be naturally studied in the strong-coupling regime of the polaron problem, where an impurity particle interacts with a surrounding quantum bath. In particular, I discuss how Bose–Fermi mixtures of ultracold atoms can host exotic molecular states involving superpositions of different particle numbers, and how mixtures of ultracold dipolar molecules enable the study of competing pairing mechanisms in unconventional superfluids. Finally, I demonstrate how excitons can probe correlated electronic states in two-dimensional semiconductors, exemplified by Wigner crystal polarons. Together, these examples establish few-body physics as a powerful lens for understanding and probing emergent phenomena in strongly correlated quantum systems.

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