Quantum Cafe: Ian Fisher

Quantum Café is CCQ’s ongoing seminar series: open to all bona fide members of the greater NYC scientific community and held every second week, Quantum Café presents a series of informal, highly interactive talks, typically by external speakers, which present the most interesting recent developments and open questions in our field.

Title: Feeling the Strain: Fields for Electronic Nematic Order

Abstract: It is common to think of strains in solids in a somewhat passive sense, simply as the response of a material to internal or external forces. However, for the case of electronic nematic order, strains of a specific symmetry can have much more important roles to play, acting as longitudinal, and even transverse, fields for the order parameter. Using such transverse field effects it becomes possible to tune materials that exhibit electronic nematic order towards a quantum phase transition. Moreover, local strains induced by chemical substitution introduce random fields, profoundly affecting the nematic critical temperature. I will illustrate these points with a variety of different materials, and discuss the possible significance.