Proposal for Workshop on Specially-Fabricated, Strongly-Correlated Materials
Professor Douglas Scalapino
University of California at Santa Barbara
Department of Physics, Brodia Hall
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
(805) 893-2871
(805) 893-8838 FAX
This proposal would bring LANL, UC, and other scientists together for a three-day workshop to discuss specially fabricated, strongly correlated materials. The participants in this workshop would discuss specific examples of strongly-correlated materials made by various techniques ranging from atomic clusters individually arranged on a surface by a tunneling tip, to epitaxial molecular beam-layered materials and self-organized, Langmuir-layered structures. The goals of the workshop are: begin to determine the present status regarding the materials that have been made and our present understanding of their properties; and to suggest modifications and extensions that will lead to new materials and new physical phenomena as well as to provide new insights into the properties of strongly-correlated electron systems.
The type of materials which would be considered range from arrays of magnetic atoms on a metal surface, to sharply-layered, magnetic-metal planar interface structures to epitaxially-grown, metal-oxide layers, to chemically produced 2D conducting polymers sandwiched between active (e.g., C{60}) layers.
We have, over the past decade, learned a great deal about strongly correlated metal oxides. The idea would be to extend this knowledge to this class of specially fabricated materials and to see how these new materials might be used to address outstanding questions, which remain regarding strongly correlated electronic systems. For example, could a Heisenberg or Hubbard n-leg ladders be built from atoms placed on a surface? Can surfaces be used as templates to make a layer of atoms that would not be stable in a bulk form but which could exhibit charge, magnetic or pairing correlations?
Along with these questions, the question of the measurement of these structures is key. What can one do with a local tunneling probe or with ARPES? Can one externally control correlations in these systems?