Events at Physics |
Events on Thursday, April 1st, 2010
- Spring Break
- R. G. Herb Condensed Matter Seminar
- Electronic Orbital Currents and Polarization in Mott Insulators
- Time: 10:00 am
- Place: 5310 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Cristian Batista, Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Abstract: Mott insulators are one of the most important classes of materials in modern solid-state physics. I will show that geometrically frustrated Mott insulators can exhibit unexpected charge effects like spontaneous circular electric currents that result from certain (scalar) chiral spin orderings or non-uniform electronic charge distributions associated with a subclass of bond orderings. We will see how these phases can appear in simple Hubbard models. In addition, I will show how these low-energy spin states contribute comparably to the dielectric and magnetic response functions, leading to interesting phenomena such as dipole-active ESR transitions, rotation the electric field polarization, and magneto-electric effects.
- Host: Natalia Perkins