Seminar on thursday

[Cond.Matt. & Stat.Mech.Section]

SEMINAR on     Disorder and strong electron correlations



Thursday, 18 October -  11:30 a.m.

 

Luigi Stasi Seminar Room,  Leonardo Building - first floor

 

Matteo PALASSINI     (Universitat de Barcelona & ICTP)

 

"Glassy physics, excitations, and  avalanches in electron glasses"

 

Abstract

 

Electron glasses are disordered systems of localized electrons with long-range Coulomb interaction, as found at low temperature in doped semiconductors, amorphous semiconductors, and granular metals.

Experiments on several of these systems demonstrate a very slowly relaxing conductivity and striking non-equilibrium effects that suggest glassy physics of electronic origin.

I will review our recent studies of the electron glass problem, mostly based on large-scale numerical computations, addressing the existence of a thermodynamic glass phase, the shape of the Coulomb gap in the single-particle density of states (which affects the variable-range hopping conductivity), and the statistics of the charge avalanches induced by a small perturbation of the system.  Throughout the talk I will emphasize analogies and differences between electron glasses and spin