Dr. Morris Brooks, Universität Zürich

In this talk we investigate the Fröhlich polaron in the strong coupling limit, which is a model describing the interactions of a charged particle, e.g. an electron, with a polarizable environment. Notably, the model is simple enough to allow for rigorous mathematical proofs, while giving rise to a multitude of interesting and non-trivial phenomena, such as an effectively increased mass of the electron. In particular, we will discuss a recent proof concerning the validity of the celebrated Landau-Pekar formula for the effective mass of the Fröhlich polaron at strong couplings, which has been an outstanding open problem in mathematical physics conjectured by Spohn in 1987.