Condensed concepts

The BCS theory of superconductivity is one of the towering intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. There are many ingredients to...

I am spending more time with undergraduates lately: helping in a lab (scary!), lecturing, marking assignments, supervising small research pr...

It is hard to believe that we really don't understand the basic issues that I am going to discuss. Resitivity occurs in a metal becaus...

There is some fascinating solid state physics in geology, particularly associated with phase transitions between different crystal structure...

Previously, I posted about the tricky problem of establishing experimentally that an unconventional superconductor that the Cooper pairs are...

Carl Caves has a helpful two pager, tips for solving physics homework problems . It nicely emphasises the importance of drawing a clear diag...

A science fiction fantasy is that we should be able to make "materials by design" that have any physical property (density, therma...

Each time I teach a course I realise there is some particular intellectual challenge for students that I take for granted because the issue ...

Here are a couple of things I find surprising about the electronic transport properties of materials. 1. One cannot simply have materials,...

On tuesday I had nice discussion with Raghu Mahajan, Maissam Barkeshli, and Sean Hartnoll about their recent preprint  Non-Fermi liquids and...

This week in the Kondo reading group we are working through chapter 6 of Hewson, entitled "Exact solutions and the Bethe Ansatz." ...

To the experienced this post may seem a bit basic but I think it does concern something really important that students must learn and resear...

The (Sommerfeld-)Wilson ratio is an important quantity to characterise strongly correlated Fermi liquids. Chapter 5 of Hewson's book ...

At the cake meeting this week I gave a talk on Nozieres' classic 1974 paper, A "Fermi liquid" description of the Kondo Problem...

Several earlier posts discussed the thermoelectric effect in strongly correlated electron materials. The Seebeck coefficient S is a quantit...

Metamagnetism occurs when the magnetic susceptibility increases with increasing magnetic field. This generally does not occur in weakly int...

I have been working through a really nice article Electrothermal transport coefficients at finite frequencies by Sriram Shastry . The key i...

Finding universal dimensionless ratios has proven key in understanding both elemental metals and strongly correlated Fermi liquids. Examples...

Today I encountered the following apparent puzzle. Suppose one has system with a self energy which is the sum of an impurity term and a mar...

Two important signatures of a Fermi liquid metal are that at low temperatures (i.e. much less than the Fermi temperature) the specific heat ...