Condensed concepts

Quantisation of magnetic flux in a superconductor Magnets and electrical currents produce magnetic fields, regions of space where other magn...

In 1994 superconductivity was discovered in strontium ruthenate (Sr2RuO4). This attracted considerable interest because it had a perovskite...

Tony Leggett died last week. The New York Times has a nice obituary. One measure of his influence on me is that more than 20 posts on this ...

In February 1986, Bednorz and Müller made a stunning discovery: superconductivity at a temperature of 35 K in a doped copper oxide (cuprate)...

They are anisotropic marginal Fermi liquids. A commenter on my recent AI blog post mentioned the following preprint, with a very different p...

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis received the prize  “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling an...

In 1986, Steven Weinberg published an article,  Superconductivity for Particular Theorists , in which he stated "No one did more than N...

I just posted on the arXiv a long review article on emergence Emergence: from physics to biology, sociology, and computer science The abstra...

Phase diagrams have been ubiquitous in materials science for decades. They show what states of matter are thermodynamically stable depending...

Superconductivity beautifully illustrates the characteristics of emergent properties. Novelty.  Distinct properties of the superconducting s...

In two dimensions the phase transition that occurs for superfluids, superconductors, and planar classical magnets is qualitatively different...

Two characteristics of states of matter are associated with them being referred to as quantum. One characteristic is the importance of quant...

I wrote a post about superconductivity being central to the plot of the cult-classic movie, Joe Versus the Volcano. A commenter on the post ...

 Recently my wife and I watched the movie, Joe Versus the Volcano , starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. What I did not expect was that making s...

Nuclear physics exhibits many characteristics associated with emergent phenomena. These include a hierarchy of scales, effective interaction...

One of the most basic ideas in science is the controlled experiment. A single "independent" variable is changed while all others a...

An important question about emergent properties is whether they can be explained solely in terms of the properties of the components of the ...