Description
Metastability —the persistence of a system in a long-lived, non-equilibrium state— is a ubiquitous phenomenon in physics, underlying behaviors from supercooled liquids, glasses, and magnetic materials to the false vacuum in cosmology. In this talk, I will explore how metastability arises in quantum many-body dynamics. I will present rigorous results on the lifetimes of metastable states in quantum many-body systems and discuss how these effects can be probed and controlled in state-of-the-art quantum simulators.
