by
Jan Zaanen(Instituut-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics, Leiden University)
→
Europe/Stockholm
Oskar Klein auditorium
Oskar Klein auditorium
Description
The discovery that superconductivity can occur at temperatures as high
as 150 kelvins in copperoxides triggered twenty years ago a hype with
no precedent in the history of physics.
However, as a beneficial side
effect these systems were thoroughly studied and in the course of time
it became clear that at the heart of the phenomenon lies one of the
great mysteries of physics.
It is about the general laws governing
the collective quantum behaviors of large numbers of strongly
interacting electrons and I will attempt to get across the fascination
by telling stories about what has been learned in the last twenty
years: the stripes, or why this electron world has more to do with
rush hour traffic than with Fermi's electron gas; Planckian
dissipation, or why we know for sure that high Tc's normal state is
characterized by a scale invariant quantum dynamics and why this
implies that Fermi-Dirac statistics has dealings with pretty pictures.