Prof. Kaden Hazzard (Rice University) Colloquium

Monday Apr 27, 2026, 8:30 AM → 7:30 PM US/Eastern

https://kaden.rice.edu/

Prof. Hazzard theoretically studies the behavior of ultracold atomic systems. He is interested in "emergent" properties of many-body systems, and spends most of his time thinking about this phenomenon in ultracold gases. The vision is that fundamental advances in controlling, measuring, and understanding these many-body quantum systems will impact our knowledge of other fields through "quantum simulation", broadly construed, and enable applications in quantum metrology, precision measurement, and quantum computation.

8:30 AM → 9:00 AM Pickup at Cumberland House and travel to campus

Speaker: Prof. Adrian Del Maestro (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

9:00 AM → 10:00 AM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Prof. Adrian Del Maestro (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

10:00 AM → 10:30 AM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Papenbrock

10:30 AM → 11:00 AM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

SC104

Speaker: Lucas Platter

11:00 AM → 11:25 AM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Robert Grzywacz

11:30 AM → 12:00 PM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Jian Liu (University of Tennessee)

12:00 PM → 1:30 PM Lunch

Speakers: Prof. Adrian Del Maestro (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Jian Liu (University of Tennessee), Rick Mukherjee (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)

1:30 PM → 2:00 PM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Steve Johnston (University of Tennessee)

2:00 PM → 2:30 PM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Michael Guidry

2:30 PM → 3:00 PM Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Wonhee Ko (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

3:00 PM → 3:30 PM Pre-Colloquium Reception

3:30 PM → 4:30 PM Colloquium: A Strange Exchange: Paraparticles and Where to Find Them

Particle exchange statistics is a fundamental characteristic of quantum matter, conventionally thought to be constrained to either fermionic or bosonic. Each type gives distinct phenomena: fermions and the consequent exclusion principle lead to the structure of the periodic table and properties of metals, while bosons and their bunching give lasers and superfluidity.

I will discuss recent research in our group that has shown other exchange statistics are possible (beyond already-known anyons, which are restricted to two dimensions) and naturally emerge as excitations in spin models. These “paraparticles” admit non-interacting theories, unlike anyons, and I will describe our vision of using this to form the foundation of new analytic and numerical methods to provide a window into correlated matter.experiments that have led up to where we are now, and our current efforts with regards to this table-top dark matter search.

Speaker: Prof. Kaden Hazzard (Rice University)

6:00 PM → 7:30 PM Dinner

Adrian Del Maestro