Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/04/2004
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: BREAKING ELECTRONS APART IN CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS

Speaker: Dr. Senthil Todadri

Institute: Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Under suitable conditions the elementary excitations of the collective electronic ground state of a solid may behave as `broken electrons’, i.e, carry fractions of the quantum numbers of the electron. This remarkable possibility was first appreciated in one spatial dimension, and more famously later in the fractional quantum Hall effect. The last few years have seen dramatic progress in our understanding of such electron break-up phenomena. In this talk I will review some of this progress, the motivations driving it, and discuss the outlook for the near future.