Category Archives: Condensed matter

DIPC

Extended and refined by Bloch and others during the 1930s, Bloch’s theory, known as the band theory of solids, accounts very well for the conducting behaviour of materials. When atoms are joined together into a crystal, each of the individual […]

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Topological insulators are electronic materials that have a bulk band gap like an ordinary insulator but have conducting states on their edge or surface. The conducting surface is not what makes topological insulators unique, but the fact that it is […]

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For centuries, metals were employed in optical applications only as mirrors and gratings. New vistas opened up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering and the use of surface plasmon (collective electronic oscillations […]

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Over geologic time scales, seawater transforms the basalt of the ocean floor by chemical attack. At the end of this alteration process, the basalt turns partly into clays and partly into dissolved salts in sea water. Lithium, a chemical element […]

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The idea that certain natural products such as rubber are composed of giant molecules, or polymers, consisting of many repeating units linked by covalent bonds arose largely from the work of the German chemist Hermann Staudinger (1881–1965) in the early […]

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There are compounds, called isomers, that have the same molecular formulae but different molecular structures or different arrangements of atoms in space. In the so-called cis-trans isomerism, isomers have different positions of groups or specific atoms with respect to a […]

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So-called “valleytronics” is a new type of electronics that could lead to faster and more efficient computer logic systems and data storage chips in next-generation devices. Valley electrons are so named because they carry a valley “degree of freedom.” This […]

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We have considered in some previous articles the importance of the spin-orbit interaction. But it is interesting to go through some basic concepts we have seen elsewhere once again in order to grasp the surprising discovery we will be […]

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Since the discovery that graphene, the two dimensional carbon allotrope, can be isolated and incorporated into electronic devices intense research efforts have been triggered. Driving forces behind the experimental and theoretical studies of graphene are, e.g., the exceptional electronic properties, […]

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We know that incident light can provoke a strong optical response in metallic nanostructures due to the excitation of resonant plasmonic modes, i.e, the electrons in the metal become excited by the photons in the incident light and oscillate collectively. […]