George Sawatzky, UBC QMI Emeritus
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Abstract: 3d transition metal and rare earth compounds are a continued source of new discoveries of exotic physical properties impacting our everyday life. Emerging properties like; high temperature superconductivity, hard magnets, large thermoelectric effects, potential dissipationless spin transport, altermagnets, topological insulators to mention a few. I will address the question as to why these elements are unique and retain much of there atomic characteristics in the solids leading to the diversity in physical properties forcing us to address the problem of strong electron correlations in describing the electronic, magnetic and crystallographic structures. As special examples I will concentrate on the Cu and Ni transition metal oxides which are found to exhibit high temperature superconducting properties. I will describe both the many body exact diagonalization of small clusters and hybrid density functional band theory methods in attempts to understand their physical properties demonstrating the extreme interplay between the spin, charge, and lattice degrees of freedom leading to diversity in physical properties. This will also lead into a new type of electron boson coupling were the bosons are represented by local singlet triplet excitations distinct from magnons.
3:00 PM in PAS 201 / Zoom https://arizona.zoom.us/j/86395646910
Refreshments in PAS 236, 2:30PM