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
--
Cornelia Aurelio
Institut für Astronomie
ETH Hönggerberg HPF G3
CH - 8093 Zürich
Tel. +41 1 633 2553
Fax +41 1 633 1238
e-mail aurelio@phys.ethz.ch