The quest to understand what controls the electrical properties of materials has been the driving force for much of the physical science as we know it today. This award supports theoretical and computational research and education on materials that are somewhere between metals and insulators. The PI will use advanced computational techniques to study materials which have electrons that interact strongly with each other and contain many imperfections in their structure or chemistry that are reflected in the environment of the electrons. This is fundamental research to understand the nature of metals, insulators, and new states of electronic matter that may exist between them. In this intermediate region between metals and insulators, materials display qualitatively different physical behavior, the understanding of which requires new theoretical and computational tools. This research may contribute to the intellectual foundations of future device technologies and to developing new strategies to discover new materials with desired electronic properties.
This project will allow training of graduate students in theoretical and computational condensed matter physics. The PI will continue to promote and enhance scientific and technological understanding and importance of our research to the general public through various outreach activities. These will include: (1) Presenting lectures at elementary schools in order to popularize science and technology, and bring the most recent discoveries within reach of young students; (2) The PI will act as a judge at annual regional Science Fairs. These fairs involve K-12 students from public and private schools within the region; (3) The PI will also be working with high-school summer interns as a part of the "Florida Young Scholar" program, enabling them to bring cutting-edge science to the public at large through the development of JAVA animations and other web-based materials.
This award supports theoretical and computational research and education on materials that are somewhere between metals and insulators. This so-called "bad-metal" regime between a metal and an insulator is dominated by inelastic electron-electron scattering, and shows behavior qualitatively different from either phase. The impact of disorder and inhomogeneity on such strongly correlated matter is rapidly becoming one of the central issues in materials science, as recent advances in experimental probes allow direct visualization on the nanoscale and have provided compelling evidence that most systems near the metal-insulator transition are much more inhomogeneous than previously assumed. The PI will theoretically examine several key aspects of the metal-insulator transition that have come to focus through recent experimental work.
The research will be focused on providing answers to the following questions: (1) What is the physical nature of the nanoscale phase coexistence between a strongly correlated metal and a Mott insulator at finite temperature? (2) Can the physics of "Electronic Griffiths phases" associated with Mott-Anderson transitions be tackled using strong disorder renormalization group ideas, which are the tools of choice for other disorder-dominated quantum critical points? How does the competition between valence-bond formation and Kondo screening manifest itself in such disorder-driven non-Fermi liquid regimes? (3) What is the role of strong geometric frustration characterizing the long-range Coulomb interaction in producing a variety of electronically inhomogeneous phases with and without disorder?
This project will allow training of graduate students in theoretical and computational condensed matter physics. The PI will continue to promote and enhance scientific and technological understanding and importance of our research to the general public through various outreach activities. These will include: (1) Presenting lectures at elementary schools in order to popularize science and technology, and bring the most recent discoveries within reach of young students; (2) The PI will act as a Judge at annual regional Science Fairs. These fairs involve K-12 students from public and private schools within the region; (3) The PI will also be working with high-school summer interns as a part of the "Florida Young Scholar" program, enabling them to bring cutting-edge science to the public at large through the development of JAVA animations and other web-based materials.
