Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter
Professor Sudip Chakravarty
University of California at Los Angeles
Department of Physics
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1547
(310) 825-4974
The rationale for the establishment of the institute is to create an entity that is unique in its structure and its goals. The time is ripe to propose a new vision for science underlying complex matter. In the past decades, one has seen significant conceptual breakthroughs brought about through research on complex matter. Such breakthroughs are attracting an increasingly large number of talented young researchers into the field. The role of the institute could be to nurture such talents and to further our knowledge of complex collective phenomena as a whole.
I would like to see the extent to which problems involving multiple length and time scales can be understood in a rigorous manner. Problems that can be understood on the basis of single length and time scales do not constitute the most challenging problems for the future. They are all essentially solved problems. Both problems in biology and complex electronic materials involve scales that span many logarithmic decades. Is it possible to capitalize on our understanding of phase transitions and the renormalization group, both classical and quantum, to solve new problems? Can we see simplicity emerging as classes of fixed points? Can spectroscopy with a wide dynamic range elucidate questions regarding multiple time scales?
For its success it is necessary to realize that this institute should be totally integrated with the fabric of the academic community. It should involve student training in a significant manner. There are few high class institutes that are student friendly and this is a great drawback. We have the unique opportunity, for example, to interact with the University of California as a whole. The students will be able to come in contact with the state of the art research at early stages of their careers. The field of complex physical systems is so diverse that it is impossible to train students by a single individual. In this respect, the institute can serve a valuable educational purpose and would be meaningful to the mission of the universities. I favor a distributed approach in which branches of the institute are built at a selected set of campuses. This gives the system the greatest flexibility and enhances the participation of different campuses.
As to a possible workshop, I would be interested in a broad workshop of biologists and condensed matter physicists. I am interested in finding out from the biologists the extent to which collective phenomena plays an important role in the function of the brain. I am sure they will be interested in our ability to deal with strongly interacting many degrees of freedom.