Dr. Edsen Vernek
The Ohio University NQPI Seminar Series presents Edson Vernek, Glidden Visiting Professor of Physics from the Universidade Federal de Uberlandia, on “Quantum Many-Body Problems In Spin-Obit Coupled Systems,” Thursday, Jan. 23, at 4:10 p.m. in Clippinger Labs 194.
Abstract: The archetypal many-body problem in condensed mater is the Kondo effect: a collective phenomenon produced by electrons cooperating among themselves and using their spins to screen the spin of magnetic impurities embedded in a conducting environment. The interest in many-body physics and the Kondo effect has been renewed in the context of new materials with strong spin-orbit interaction (SOI). While the Kondo effect is very attractive to the many-body physics community, it results to be a troublesome intruder in other contexts. In particular, the expected signatures of Majorana zero modes (MZMs, also related to SOI) are very similar to those traditionally seen in the Kondo effect. It is therefore desirable to wreck the Kondo effect while leaving the MZMs alive or to come up with ways to tell their features apart if coexisting. SOI is also responsible for inducing non-collinear Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interactions between pairs of spins, leading to richer spin scattering processes. In multiple magnetic impurity problems, the presence of the DM interaction leads to beautiful helical magnetic structures. We will discuss some of our recent studies in spin chains, where DM has long-range, producing interesting ground state configurations.
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