Condensed Matter/Materials & Biological Physics Seminar with Samuel Norman Alperin on Reaction Diffusion Dynamics

It is widely understood that disorder is often required for slower-than-ballistic transport mechanisms such as diffusion. However, recent work has shown that diffusion can occur in certain disorderless systems. In this talk I will introduce a theoretical mechanism through which diffusive transport can emerge from a simple non-Hermitian quantum model without disorder. I will then discuss how this can be exploited to simulate a large class of classical reaction-diffusion models, including key models of spontaneous pattern forming dynamics. Finally, using a newly discovered geometric duality I will demonstrate that reaction-diffusion dynamics on curved spaces can also be simulated, with a non-Hermitian quantum model which remains in flat space.