Om hensigt og metode

Oversætterens note: Teksten er en oversættelse af indledningen til Erich Auerbachs sidste bog, den posthumt udgivne Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958)

Cities of the South, Cities of the North

In the wake of the end of the cold-war and the demise of the tripartite conceptual division of the First, Second and Third Worlds, the latter concept has been superseded by the notion of the &#8216;Global South&#8217;. This notion is a flexible one referring to the developing nations of the once-colonized sections of the globe. The concept does not merely register shifts in geopolitics and in the respective affiliations of nations and the economic transformations that have occurred. It also registers an emergent perception of a new set of relationships between nations of the South. It is the task of this project to explore those &#8216;lateral&#8217; south-south cultural connections by mobilizing a network of prominent Global-South universities (UFF, Brazil; UNAM, Mexico; Wits, South Africa; UCAD, Senegal; JNU, India) with other universities in the southern hemisphere (UWA, Australia; SNU, Korea). Erich Auerbach is the Visiting Chair of Global Literary Studies at the University of TübingenCities of the South, Cities of the North, symposium, ICI Berlin, 14 December 2015 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e151214

Exact Parent Hamiltonian for the Quantum Hall States in a Optical Lattice

We study lattice models of charged particles in uniform magnetic fields. We show how longer range hopping can be engineered to produce a massively degenerate manifold of single-particle ground states with wavefunctions identical to those making up the lowest Landau level of continuum electrons in a magnetic field. We find that in the presence of local interactions, and at the appropriate filling factors, Laughlin's fractional quantum Hall wavefunction is an exact many-body ground state of our lattice model. The hopping matrix elements in our model fall off as a Gaussian, and when the flux per plaquette is small compared to the fundamental flux quantum one only needs to include nearest and next nearest neighbor hoppings. We suggest how to realize this model using atoms in optical lattices, and describe observable consequences of the resulting fractional quantum Hall physics.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Published versio