Title: Heavy Fermion Perspectives on Quantum Materials
Speaker: Piers Coleman
Time: 9:30, May 8
Location: Room 215, No. 8 Hainayuan Building
Abstract:
Heavy Fermion materials, though discovered nearly a half century ago, continue to prove themselves as a vital test-bed for exploring the emergent behavior of electrons at the brink of localization, where magnetic atoms behave as miniature qubits, tunably entangling on a macroscopic scale. I will give an introduction the current landscape of heavy fermion physics, and the new perspectives on quantum materials they are giving rise to.
I shall discuss the relationship of heavy fermion materials to the Kondo lattice model, explaining the expansion of the Fermi surface as a consequence of spin fractionalization. I shall discuss the following topics of current interest: the paradoxical discovery of quantum oscillations in insulators, a new generation of strange metal and quantum critical behavior, the link with other flat band systems, such as twisted bilayer graphene, and the role of the Kondo effect in triplet heavy fermion superconductors, such as UTe2.
Biography:
Piers Coleman completed his undergraduate education at Trinity College, Cambridge; he later studied theoretical condensed matter physics at Princeton University with Philip Warren Anderson. He was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Santa Barbara. He joined the faculty at Rutgers University in 1987. Since 2010 he has also held the position of University of London Chair of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2011, Piers Coleman replaced David Pines as a co-director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter.
Coleman is known for his work related to strongly correlated electron systems, and in particular, the study of magnetism, superconductivity and topological insulators. He is the author of the popular text Introduction to Many-Body Physics.
