Modern physics is rooted in two paradigmatic principles: the universe is made of particles with wave-like characteristics, and those particles are only influenced by their immediate surroundings -- an idea called the principle of locality. For the past 30 years, a class of copper-based materials has defied explanation in terms of these basic concepts, thus forcing a potentially groundbreaking rethinking of theoretical physics' foundation. In this talk I will explore recent attempts to model these materials by abandoning particle- and locality-based perspectives of nature. All such models posit anomalous dimensions for gauge fields and even conserved currents. I will show the latter is not necessarily a contradiction but making sense of this idea necessitates the existence of dimensions beyond the space of daily life, raising the question: is copper a window into deeper structure of our universe?
Professor Philip Phillips received his bachelor's degree from Walla Walla College in 1979, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1982. After a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley, he joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984-1993). Professor Phillips came to the University of Illinois in 1993.
Professor Phillips is a theoretical condensed matter physicist who has an international reputation for his work on transport in disordered and strongly correlated low-dimensional systems. He is the inventor of various models for Bose metals, Mottness, and the random dimer model, which exhibits extended states in one dimension, thereby representing an exception to the localization theorem of Anderson's.