Seminars & Colloquia

What's between a free-electon gas and a magnet

Prof. James L. Smith
Materials Technology: Metallurgy - MST-6
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Wednesday, November 19, 2003
4:00 pm, Higgins 310
Refreshments precede the talk, Higgins 230, 3:30 pm

Electrons in partially filled shells either hold solids together or have a magnetic moment. This explains copper and maybe iron. However, there is an intermediate case where many strange things can happen. This occurs in the electrons in cerium, uranium, and a few other elements. We can find electrons with very heavy effective masses and strange superconductors. These are often called highly correlated electron systems. I shall in a very simple way talk about these things and some recent results.