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Kondo Effect
In physics, the Kondo effect describes the scattering of conduction electrons in a metal due to magnetic impurities, resulting in a characteristic change i.e. a minimum in electrical resistivity with temperature. The cause of the effect was first explained by Jun Kondo, who applied third-order perturbation theory to the problem to account for scattering of s-orbital conduction electrons off d-orbital electrons localized at impurities ( Kondo model). Kondo's calculation predicted that the scattering rate and the resulting part of the resistivity should increase logarithmically as the temperature approaches 0 K. Experiments in the 1960s by Myriam Sarachik at Bell Laboratories provided the first data that confirmed the Kondo effect. Extended to a lattice of ''magnetic impurities'', the Kondo effect likely explains the formation of ''heavy fermions'' and ''Kondo insulators'' in intermetallic compounds, especially those involving rare earth elements such as cerium, praseodymium, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Dot
Quantum dots (QDs) are semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size, having light, optical and electronics, electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles as a result of quantum mechanics. They are a central topic in nanotechnology. When the quantum dots are illuminated by UV light, an electron in the quantum dot can be excited to a state of higher energy. In the case of a semiconductor, semiconducting quantum dot, this process corresponds to the transition of an electron from the valence band to the conductance band. The excited electron can drop back into the valence band releasing its energy as light. This light emission (photoluminescence) is illustrated in the figure on the right. The color of that light depends on the energy difference between the conductance band and the valence band, or the transition between discrete energy states when band structure is no longer a good definition in QDs. In the language of materials science, nanoscale semiconductor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ultracold Atom
Ultracold atoms are atoms that are maintained at temperatures close to 0 kelvin (absolute zero), typically below several tens of microkelvin (µK). At these temperatures the atom's quantum-mechanical properties become important. To reach such low temperatures, a combination of several techniques typically has to be used. First, atoms are usually trapped and pre-cooled via laser cooling in a magneto-optical trap. To reach the lowest possible temperature, further cooling is performed using evaporative cooling in a magnetic or optical trap. Several Nobel prizes in physics are related to the development of the techniques to manipulate quantum properties of individual atoms (e.g. 1995-1997, 2001, 2005, 2012, 2017). Experiments with ultracold atoms study a variety of phenomena, including quantum phase transitions, Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC), bosonic superfluidity, quantum magnetism, many-body spin dynamics, Efimov states, Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Simulator
Quantum simulators permit the study of a quantum system in a programmable fashion. In this instance, simulators are special purpose devices designed to provide insight about specific physics problems. Note: This manuscript is a contribution of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and is not subject to US copyright. Quantum simulators may be contrasted with generally programmable "digital" quantum computers, which would be capable of solving a wider class of quantum problems. A universal quantum simulator is a quantum computer proposed by Yuri Manin in 1980 and Richard Feynman in 1982. Feynman showed that a classical Turing machine would not be able to simulate a quantum effect, while his hypothetical universal quantum computer would be able to mimic needed quantum effect. A quantum system of many particles could be simulated by a quantum computer using a number of quantum bits similar to the number of particles in the original system. This has been extende ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Majorana Fermion
A Majorana fermion (, uploaded 19 April 2013, retrieved 5 October 2014; and also based on the pronunciation of physicist's name.), also referred to as a Majorana particle, is a fermion that is its own antiparticle. They were hypothesised by Ettore Majorana in 1937. The term is sometimes used in opposition to a Dirac fermion, which describes fermions that are not their own antiparticles. With the exception of neutrinos, all of the Standard Model fermions are known to behave as Dirac fermions at low energy (lower than the electroweak symmetry breaking temperature), and none are Majorana fermions. The nature of the neutrinos is not settled – they may turn out to be either Dirac or Majorana fermions. In condensed matter physics, quasiparticle excitations can appear like bound Majorana fermions. However, instead of a single fundamental particle, they are the collective movement of several individual particles (themselves composite) which are governed by non-Abelian statistics. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angle-resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy
Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) is an experimental technique used in condensed matter physics to probe the allowed energies and momenta of the electrons in a material, usually a crystalline solid. It is based on the photoelectric effect, in which an incoming photon of sufficient energy ejects an electron from the surface of a material. By directly measuring the kinetic energy and emission angle distributions of the emitted photoelectrons, the technique can map the electronic band structure and Fermi surfaces. ARPES is best suited for the study of one- or two-dimensional materials. It has been used by physicists to investigate high-temperature superconductors, graphene, Topological insulator, topological materials, quantum well states, and materials exhibiting charge density waves. ARPES systems consist of a monochromatic light source to deliver a narrow beam of photons, a sample holder connected to a manipulator used to position the sample of a material, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plutonium
Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that can expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that is pyrophoric. It is radioactive and can accumulate in bones, which makes the handling of plutonium dangerous. Plutonium was first synthetically produced and isolated in late 1940 and early 1941, by a deuteron bombardment of uranium-238 in the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. First, neptunium-238 ( half-life 2.1 days) was synthesized, which subsequently beta-decayed to form the new element with atomic number 94 and atomic weight 238 (half-life 88 years). Since ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superconductors
Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source. The superconductivity phenomenon was discovered in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a phenomenon which can only be explained by quantum mechanics. It is characterized by the Meissner effect, the complete ejection of magnetic field lines from the interior of the superconductor during its transitions into the sup ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asymptotic Freedom
In quantum field theory, asymptotic freedom is a property of some gauge theories that causes interactions between particles to become asymptotically weaker as the energy scale increases and the corresponding length scale decreases. Asymptotic freedom is a feature of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, the fundamental constituents of nuclear matter. Quarks interact weakly at high energies, allowing perturbative calculations. At low energies, the interaction becomes strong, leading to the confinement of quarks and gluons within composite hadrons. The asymptotic freedom of QCD was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and independently by David Politzer in the same year. For this work all three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. Discovery Asymptotic freedom in QCD was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and independently by David Politzer in the same year. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Schrieffer–Wolff Transformation
In quantum mechanics, the Schrieffer–Wolff transformation is a unitary transformation used to perturbatively diagonalize the system Hamiltonian to first order in the interaction. As such, the Schrieffer–Wolff transformation is an operator version of second-order perturbation theory. The Schrieffer–Wolff transformation is often used to project out the high energy excitations of a given quantum many-body Hamiltonian in order to obtain an effective low energy model. The Schrieffer–Wolff transformation thus provides a controlled perturbative way to study the strong coupling regime of quantum-many body Hamiltonians. Although commonly attributed to the paper in which the Kondo model was obtained from the Anderson impurity model by J.R. Schrieffer and P.A. Wolff., Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger and Walter Kohn used this method in an earlier work about non-periodic k·p perturbation theory In solid-state physics, the k·p perturbation theory is an approximated semi-empirical app ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Renormalization
Renormalization is a collection of techniques in quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, that are used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities by altering values of these quantities to compensate for effects of their self-interactions. But even if no infinities arose in loop diagrams in quantum field theory, it could be shown that it would be necessary to renormalize the mass and fields appearing in the original Lagrangian. For example, an electron theory may begin by postulating an electron with an initial mass and charge. In quantum field theory a cloud of virtual particles, such as photons, positrons, and others surrounds and interacts with the initial electron. Accounting for the interactions of the surrounding particles (e.g. collisions at different energies) shows that the electron-system behaves as if it had a different mass and charge than initially postulated. Renormalization, in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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