Flore Kunst

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While most theoretical research focusses on studying systems isolated from their surroundings, we take a more realistic perspective by taking environmental effects such as gain and loss of particles explicitly into account. As a consequence, we arrive at so-called non-Hermitian descriptions. This approach is highly relevant to quantum optics, electronics, mechanical metamaterials, nonconservative biological systems as well as quantum systems, to name a few. In recent years, non-Hermiticity has been investigated in the context of topology, which is a branch of mathematics describing properties that can only change step-wise and which has found many applications in physics. Adding the ingredients of non-Hermitian approaches and topology together has revealed a dramatic enrichment of the phenomenology of topological phases and resulted in a new, rapidly expanding cross-disciplinary research field. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the field focussing on fundamental aspects, experimental realizations and I will briefly touch on applications.

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Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
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Contact: Simon Trebst