Reminder: Today, PHYSICS COLLOQUIUM
Speaker: Prof. B. Altshuler, Uni Princeton
Title: Zero Dimensional Fermi Liquid
Date / Time: Wednesday, February 5, 2003, 16:45 h (tea starts at 16:15 h)
Place / Room: HPH G4
Abstract: The paradigm of Fermi liquid is in the focus of any theoretical description of normal metals. Although formally the interaction between the current curriers is not week -potential energy of the interaction usually exceeds the kinetic energy - many questions can be answered in terms of weakly interacting quasiparticles. At the same time there exist materials and physical situations for which the Fermi liquid approach is not applicable. Nevertheless we will not discuss possible "non-Fermi liquid" states and instead will revisit the foundations of the Fermi liquid theory. Traditional formulation of this theory is based on the translation invariance of the problem, which makes momenta of the quasiparticles good quantum numbers. Is it possible to discuss in a similar way situations, when the translation invariance is violated by a static potential (e.g., static disorder)? We will concentrate on the most dramatically different case - when electrons are confined in a rather small volume, and the relevant energy scales, such as temperature, are small. It turns out that such systems (quantum dots) can be described in a way that indeed resembles the Fermi liquid in all of its basic conclusions. We will illustrate the validity of this "Fermi droplet" theory by a number of examples.
With best regards, C. Aurelio