UBC Mathematics Colloquium: Martin Fraas

Adiabatic theory studies dynamical systems featuring separation of motion into slow and fast components. When the system is driven these components start mixing. The basic premise of adiabatic theory is that this mixing is small for slow driving. Furthermore, the resulting driven motion is irreversible in the slow component but reversible in the fast component. In this talk, I first illustrate this phenomena on a spinning top and state the classical adiabatic theorem of quantum mechanics. Then, I will show extensions of the theory to abstract Banach spaces and stochastic equations, culminating with an adiabatic theorem for extended systems where the separation holds uniformly in the volume of the system. An important corollary of this theorem is a proof of the Kubo formula for gapped interacting systems.