Tentative course outline

 
We'll cover a range of modern topics in nonequilibrium and mesoscopic physics. Below is a tentative list, which will be adjusted and modified as we go depending on your preferences and interests. For each topic, we'll discuss relevant experiments and experimental setups as well as basic scales and phenomena. We'll develop a simple qualitative understanding of key phenomena before diving into theory and compare theory with experiment. The order of topics is somewhat arbitrary, and we'll decide in the first lecture in which order to cover them.
  1. Mesoscopic physics, quantum transport

    1. Quantum dots and quantum point contacts

    2. Coulomb blockade of transport through a quantum dot

    3. Conductance quantization, Landauer formulation

  2. Quantum chaotic and integrable systems

    1. Measures of quantum chaos (energy level statistics, out-of-time-order correlators, etc.)

    2. Random matrix theory and its applications, quantum dots

    3. Quantum integrability, energy level statistics in integrable systems

  3. Interactions on nano and meso scale

    1. "Universal" Hamiltonian, Stoner instability

    2. Mesoscopic superconductivity, Richardson model, even-odd effects

  4. Solid state qubits and other few-electron devices

    1. Superconducting qubits, Cooper pair boxes, flux, charge, and spin qubits

    2. Dephasing and decoherence due to coupling to environment

    3. Transmons (qubits employed in Google and IBM quantum computing)
  5. Anderson and Many-Body Localization

    1. Scaling theory of localization

    2. Anderson localization

    3. Many-body localization, entanglement entropy

  6. Far from equilibrium many-body physics

    1. Quantum quenches, Generalized Gibbs distribution

    2. Far from equilibrium superconductivity, theory and experiments

    3. Driven and dissipative systems, Landau-Zener tunneling