Prof. Kaden Hazzard (Rice University) Colloquium

Monday 27 Apr 2026, 08:30 → 19:30 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.

1 Pickup at Cumberland House and travel to campus

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

2 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

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

3 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Papenbrock

4 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

SC104

Speaker: Lucas Platter

5 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Robert Grzywacz

6 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Jian Liu (University of Tennessee)

7 Lunch

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

8 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Steve Johnston (University of Tennessee)

9 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Michael Guidry

10 Meeting with UTK Physics & Astronomy Faculty

Speaker: Wonhee Ko (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

11 Pre-Colloquium Reception

12 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)

18:00 Dinner

Adrian Del Maestro