Program of the symposium: «Strongly correlated electron systems».

GEFES is organising a symposium for the next RSEF Bienal meeting. The symposium will take place on July 15th-16th afternoons. The selected topic is «Strongly correlated electron systems». Antony Carrington (University of Bristol) is the invited plenary speaker of the symposium. In the context of the International year of light, we will also count with a plenary talk in Quantum optics by Elisabeth Giacobino (CNRS Research Director at the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel).

The invited speakers in the symposium are:

Leni Bascones (Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, CSIC)
Verónica Salgueiriño (Universidad de Vigo)
Pablo Alonso (CIC nanoGUNE)
Alejandro Manjavacas (Rice University)
Marco Gobbi (Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculairs, Strasbourg)

There will be two sessions for oral contributions on the topics of the symposium. A poster session will also be organized. Submissions on other topics on Solid State Physics will also be considered and welcome. Find the instructions for sending abstracts in the Bienal webpage.

Strongly correlated electron systems

R.B. Laughlin wrote back in 2005 «… in the fifty years since people began working on the correlated-electron effect in earnest, no progress has been made in clarifying the thing that counts: what the effect is». The aim of this symposium is to discuss latest advances in the field and see whether these have brought some clarification – or not.

Electrons are always correlated, or entangled, and usual computational techniques to describe their behavior work well in many Condensed Matter systems. However, systems showing most spectacular and technologically promising properties fall beyond our present understanding of correlations. As so often in Nature, these properties are emergent, they simply do not exist outside Condensed Matter. Among these are: magnetism in magnetically ordered systems – atomic scale magnetism will provide ultra-small devices and storage systems; topological insulators – will be useful to build quantum computers; or high temperature superconductors – already now among the most important technologies to establish a smart grid.

In this symposium we will bring together theory and experiment that contribute to establish the correct approximations describing the new emergent properties. Among others, we will address the following topics:

– Correlated oxides and heterostructures.
– Iron superconductors.
– Cuprates and iridates.
– Heavy fermion systems.
– Nanoscale superconductivity and vortex lattices.
– Topological insulators and metal to insulator transition.
– Quantum phase transitions.
– Theory for strong correlations.
– New Materials: growth of high quality single crystals and their characterization.

The inset in the slider image is the temperature versus pressure phase diagram for iron pnictides. Image courtesy of Antony Carrington.