Colloquium

Quantum spin liquid: from drought to deluge

Patrick Lee    
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Higgins 310, 4 pm

The idea of anti-ferromagnetic order was initially greeted with skepticism when Louis Néel introduced it in the '30s but is now considered obvious. Indeed, the search for an exception has turned up empty-handed for 30 years until recently, when a couple of promising examples have surfaced. I shall argue that if confirmed, this represents a new state of matter, called quantum spin liquid, which exhibits novel properties such as emergent fermionic excitations and gauge fields and is related to the de-confinement of a strongly coupled lattice gauge theory.