Prof. Steve Kivelson, Stanford

"The physics of superconducting transition temperatures"

Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102

Abstract: Weakly interacting electrons are metallic, while strong enough interactions generically lead to insulating spin and charge ordered phases. High temperature superconductivity occurs as a crossover phenomenon where there is a maximal degree of “quantum frustration” – i.e. where structure in real-space and momentum space are equally important. Entirely new considerations govern the physic of the superconducting transition temperature when, in contrast to the case in “conventional” superconductors, Tc is not all that small compared to microscopic scales. Some of the new features, including the role of superconducting phase fluctuations and an inhomogeneous response to disorder, will be discussed, both abstractly, and using the cuprate high temperature superconductors as an illustrative example.