Outreach

Montse Casas in memoriam: Fisher information, supersymmetry and variable mass

July 19, 2013

This is a special Colloquium that looks back on the research activity of Montse Casas (1955-2013), member of IFISC since its foundation and also Rector of UIB (2007-2013). The speaker of this Colloquium will be Angel Plastino, from Universidad de La Plata, Argentina, who was a close collaborator of Montse for more than 20 years, collaboration that has yielded around 90 papers.
From this moment IFISC Seminar Room will be named Montse Casas' Seminar Room.

In solid state physics, a particle's effective mass is the mass it seems to carry. It can be shown that electrons and holes in some solid state scenarios respond to electric and magnetic fields almost as if they were particles with a position dependent mass. They behave as free particles in a vacuum, but with a different mass. The effective mass approximation provides an important and widely used theoretic tool for the determination of the electronic properties of semiconductors and quantum dots. The concept of effective mass also plays an important role within the structures of the energy density functional (EDF) approach to the quantum many body problem.

We discuss here the effective mass concept from three different viewpoints, namely, Fisher's Information, Super-symmetry, and De Broglie-Bohm's dynamics.

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