Elastic interactions and complex patterns in binary systems
Ross H. McKenzie (noreply@blogger.com)
One of the many beauties of condensed matter physics is that it can reveal and illuminate how two systems or phenomena that at first appear to be quite different actually involve similar physics. This is an example of universality: for emergent phenomena, many details don't really matter. One example is the similarities between superconductivity and superfluidity. A consequence of universality is that the same concepts, techniques, toy models, and effective theories can be used to describe a...