MANY-BODY PHYSICS

Abstract

The study of many-body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new states and properties of matter, phenomena such as superfluidity, the Meissner, the Kondo and the fractional quantum hall effects, have driven the development of new conceptual frameworks for our understanding about collective behaviour, the ramifications of which have spread far beyond the confines of terrestrial condensed matter physics- to cosmology, nuclear and particle physics. Here, we are selectively reviewing some of the developments in this field, from the cold-war period, until the present day. With the discovery of new classes of collective order, the unfolding puzzles of high temperature superconductivity and quantum criticality, the prospects for major conceptual discoveries remain as bright today as they were more than half a century ago.