Physics Colloquium

Sriram Ganeshan, Ph.D., assistant professor at City College, City University of New York (CCNY), will present, “Chiral Hydrodynamics: From Active Matter to Quantum Hall Fluids.”

Our understanding of the universal phenomenon in many-body systems ranging from subatomic to astronomical scales relies largely on the hydrodynamical framework. Thus, the discovery of a new hydrodynamic effect opens new understanding in a multitude of physical systems. Such a new hydrodynamical effect recently has come from quantum Hall effect (QHE), where Avron, Seiler, and Zograf showed that the viscosity of QH fluid is purely dissipation-less and is the off-diagonal component of the total viscosity tensor, dubbed “odd” or “Hall” viscosity. It turns out that odd viscosity is not limited to QH, but a special symmetry allowed term of a parity broken system in two dimensions. In this talk, Ganeshan will outline several fascinating fluid phenomena induced by odd viscosity terms, such as “odd” torque, “odd” surface waves. and “odd” bubbles, and discuss their applicability in a wide class of systems ranging from chiral active matter to fractional quantum Hall effect.