Professor Stephen Blundell explores the many universes of quantum materials for the 2019 Quantum Materials Public Lecture.
Physicists try to find the laws that govern the Universe, discover new particles and explain phenomena. But what if the rules that govern the Universe were different? What would happen then? This question is not just an academic one. Every new material discovered is behaves like a new Universe, with different laws and sometimes new particles. This talk explains how this idea works in practice and how the different universes discovered in so-called quantum materials are changing the way we think about the physical world.