4 Corner Southwest Ontario Condensed Matter Physics Symposium 2011

It is a generic feature of strongly correlated electronic systems that several mechanisms (broadly represented by interactions) compete with each other. This competition often leads to the phenomenon of frustration. In strongly correlated systems such as doped Mott insulators kinetic energy and…

Many of the most interesting electronic behaviors arise in materials with strong electron-electron correlations. Many of these same materials are disordered either intrinsically or due to doping. The combination of disorder and interactions generally gives rise to a feature in the density of states…

Recently resonant elastic soft x-ray scattering (RSXS) has emerged as a powerful new tool to study electronic ordering in materials like cuprates and manganites. The power of this technique is to combine xray scattering, which is sensitive to spatial order, with x-ray spectroscopy, which is…

Direct visualization of the electronic structure within each crystalline unit cell of a solid is a new frontier in condensed matter physics (M.J. Lawler et al, Nature 466, 347 (2010)). In this talk, I will introduce the techniques of spectroscopic imaging scanning tunneling microscopy (SI-­ 

The nature of the pairing mechanism in the recently discoverediron-pnictide family of superconductors remains an outstanding issue. To answer this question, it is instructive to know the symmetry of the superconducting energy gap. Low temperature thermal conductivity measurements provide a robust…

Utilizing the Baym-Kadanoff formalism with the polarization function calculated in the random phase approximation, the dynamics of the ν=0, ±1, ±2, ±3, ±4 quantum Hall states in bilayer graphene is analyzed. In particular, in the undoped graphene, corresponding to the ν =0 state…

Geometrical frustration in magnetic systems provides a rich playground to study the emergence of novel ground states. In systems where not all magnetic couplings can be simultaneously satisfied, conventional long range magnetic order is often precluded, or pushed to much lower emperature scales than…

Very recently, it has been recognized that excitations out of the ground state of materials known as spin ice can be viewed as magnetic monopoles, the magnetic analog to electric charges. Like electrons and positrons, these particles possess a charge of +Q or -Q and therefore attract or repel each…

The spin 1/2 Heisenberg model on a triangular lattice with interchain exchange, J', weaker than the intrachain exchange J, is a particularly well-studied frustrated magnet because of its relevance to Cs2CuCl4, which is thought to be in close proximity to a spin liquid phase. Although an…