eQMA Distinguished Lecture – Fall 2025
Emergent Gauge Fields in Quantum Condensed Matter
Speaker: Steven Kivelson, Stanford University
Thursday (note special day)
December 4, 2025
4:00–5:00pm
Kyle Morrow Room (3rd Floor), Fondren Library
Reception to follow
Speaker Bio
Dr. Kivelson is the Prabhu Goel Family Professor of Physics at Stanford University. He is the recipient of many honors, including the American Physical Society’s 2025 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize and membership in the National Academy of Sciences.
Abstract
It has long been understood that the exact (“fundamental”) gauge symmetry of the electromagnetic fields plays an important role in the theory of quantum materials. What has come into focus more recently is that there exist essential properties of quantum phases of matter that are best understood in terms of an effective field theory with emergent gauge fields, rather than (or in addition to) in terms of broken symmetries. Here, gauge invariance is not a symmetry of the microscopic problem but is rather an efficient representation of the low energy physics. I will review the well-known usefulness of this perspective in the context of such old friends as fractional quantum Hall fluids and a variety of “quantum spin-liquids.” As time permits, I will also discuss recent theoretical results that suggest that exotic “resonating valence-bond” fluids, describable by emergent gauge theories, might exist in a much broader range of experimentally accessible platforms than has been previously appreciated.
