1,441 research outputs found
Frustration and the Kondo effect in heavy fermion materials
The observation of a separation between the antiferromagnetic phase boundary
and the small-large Fermi surface transition in recent experiments has led to
the proposal that frustration is an important additional tuning parameter in
the Kondo lattice model of heavy fermion materials. The introduction of a Kondo
(K) and a frustration (Q) axis into the phase diagram permits us to discuss the
physics of heavy fermion materials in a broader perspective. The current
experimental situation is analysed in the context of this combined "QK" phase
diagram. We discuss various theoretical models for the frustrated Kondo
lattice, using general arguments to characterize the nature of the -electron
localization transition that occurs between the spin liquid and heavy Fermi
liquid ground-states. We concentrate in particular on the Shastry--Sutherland
Kondo lattice model, for which we establish the qualitative phase diagram using
strong coupling arguments and the large- expansion. The paper closes with
some brief remarks on promising future theoretical directions.Comment: To appear in a special issue of JLT
Cooperative surmounting of bottlenecks
The physics of activated escape of objects out of a metastable state plays a
key role in diverse scientific areas involving chemical kinetics, diffusion and
dislocation motion in solids, nucleation, electrical transport, motion of flux
lines superconductors, charge density waves, and transport processes of
macromolecules, to name but a few. The underlying activated processes present
the multidimensional extension of the Kramers problem of a single Brownian
particle. In comparison to the latter case, however, the dynamics ensuing from
the interactions of many coupled units can lead to intriguing novel phenomena
that are not present when only a single degree of freedom is involved. In this
review we report on a variety of such phenomena that are exhibited by systems
consisting of chains of interacting units in the presence of potential
barriers.
In the first part we consider recent developments in the case of a
deterministic dynamics driving cooperative escape processes of coupled
nonlinear units out of metastable states. The ability of chains of coupled
units to undergo spontaneous conformational transitions can lead to a
self-organised escape. The mechanism at work is that the energies of the units
become re-arranged, while keeping the total energy conserved, in forming
localised energy modes that in turn trigger the cooperative escape. We present
scenarios of significantly enhanced noise-free escape rates if compared to the
noise-assisted case.
The second part deals with the collective directed transport of systems of
interacting particles overcoming energetic barriers in periodic potential
landscapes. Escape processes in both time-homogeneous and time-dependent driven
systems are considered for the emergence of directed motion. It is shown that
ballistic channels immersed in the associated high-dimensional phase space are
the source for the directed long-range transport
The enigma of the pseudogap phase of the cuprate superconductors
The last few years have seen significant experimental progress in
characterizing the copper-based hole-doped high temperature superconductors in
the regime of low hole density, p. Quantum oscillations, NMR, X-ray, and STM
experiments have shed much light on the nature of the ordering at low
temperatures. We review evidence that the order parameter in the
non-Lanthanum-based cuprates is a d-form factor density-wave. This novel order
acts as an unexpected window into the electronic structure of the pseudogap
phase at higher temperatures in zero field: we argue in favor of a
`fractionalized Fermi liquid' (FL*) with 4 pockets of spin S=1/2, charge +e
fermions enclosing an area specified by p.Comment: 37 pages, 19 figures, 100+ references. Proceedings of the 50th
Karpacz Winter School of Theoretical Physics, 2-9 March 2014, Karpacz, Polan
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