Lorenzo Gavassino

University of Cambridge, UK, Friday, September 11, 2026

Relativistic many-body dynamics in a single quantum particle

In this talk, I will present a novel approach for studying the linear-response properties of relativistic matter. I will show that a broad class of models, including kinetic theory and transient hydrodynamics, can be equivalently rewritten in the linear regime as Schrödinger equations in imaginary time. The resulting quantum systems typically involve a single particle in an electrically perturbed potential, making the problem analytically tractable in many cases. Moreover, the two descriptions are linked by a universal dictionary. Hydrodynamic and non-hydrodynamic modes become perturbed ground states and excited states, respectively; the free energy of the perturbation becomes the Hilbert-space norm; the entropy-production rate becomes the expectation value of the unperturbed Hamiltonian; and transport coefficients become perturbative Stark-splitting coefficients. I will then show how this quantum reformulation can be used to settle a long-standing question: how does relativistic causality constrain transport?