Abstract

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/YiBXqfTzwEA

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In late 19th-century Cambridge, an age of coal and steel, J. J. Thomson’s experiments on the nature of the electron would have seemed exotic and practically useless. A generation later, when an entire industry had grown around the use of vacuum tubes, few people again would have seriously considered replicating such devices in solids. But because in high purity crystals electrons can travel over long distances without scattering – mimicking properties of the vacuum within the solid state – electrons can be controlled and manipulated to a previously unimagined degree. Whereas in semiconductors the mobile electrons are highly diluted, electrons in metals form a dense, interacting quantum liquid. These ‘quantum materials’ can host new states of matter, which are classified in terms of broken symmetries – such as magnetism, superconductivity and charge density wave order – or in terms of topological invariants. This talk will review research in this area and consider where it may lead.