Kenji Fukushima
From
In residence at
Institut Denis Poisson / CNRS, University of Orléans, University of Tours - FR
Host scientist
Maxim Chernodub
BIOGRAPHY
Kenji Fukushima earned his Ph.D in physics at The University of Tokyo in 2002 and is currently a full professor at Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo. After graduation, he worked at MIT, RIKEN Brookhaven Research Center, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Keio University. His research works have focused on matter properties in extreme environments at high temperatures in relativistic nuclear collisions and high densities in central cores of the neutron stars.
PROJECT
Quantum phases of matter in gravitational spacetimes
This multidisciplinary project seeks to start long-lasting collaboration to unravel the puzzles of quantum phases of matter in curved gravitational spacetimes, with a general aim to shorten the gaps between quantum mechanics and general relativity with applications in astrophysics, nuclear physics, and condensed matter physics. The project is centered around rotating quark-gluon matter (twirling faster than 10^22 rotations per second) created at extremely high temperatures (larger than 10^12 K) achieved in non-central heavy-ion collision experiments. Its properties, such as thermodynamics, phase transitions, inhomogeneous structure, and the experimental signatures of these features, are of great interest to the scientific community. The community has just realized that this system is a modern version of the century-old Barnett effect (a reverse process of the famous Einstein-de Haas phenomenon), which holds yet inexplicable properties. Profound contradictions between various theoretical results obtained in different models deepen the mystery of the rotating plasma even further, opening new avenues for the research.
The project aims to start collaboration on three concrete questions:
1. Rotating (vortical) matter: what is the spatial structure of vortical quark-gluon matter?
2. The Casimir effect for vacuum properties in bounded spacetimes: how are the quark-gluon quantum fluctuations modified by the finite-size boundary?
3. The trace quantum anomaly in hot and dense and vortical matter: what is the interplay between the origin of the mass quantified by the gluon condensate through the trace anomaly and the emergent spatial/phase structure of vortical quark-gluon matter?
These topics and questions are distinct facets of common fundamentals, i.e., rich quantum contents manipulated by controlled gravitational spacetimes. Within the project, these questions will be further probed in the scope of generic interacting quantum field theories, addressing the properties of quantum fields in gravitational backgrounds at a more fundamental level encompassing rotating and accelerating spacetimes.