3:00 pm in Howey Lecture Room 5 (pre-reception at 2:30 in Howey N201)
Michael Fogler
University of California, San Diego
"One-dimensional traffic woes from antiquity to present day"
For centuries, laterally confined transport routes have been used largely out of necessity, although occasionally they helped with crowd control and military defense. Today we are purposely interested in the ultimate limit of the lateral confinement --- 1D and quasi-1D conductors --- in a hope to build tiny electronic devices. Examples of the building blocks under consideration include nanowires, nanotubes, nanofibers, and nanoribbons. In practice, unavoidable disorder turns any of these structures into a quantum obstacle course with barriers of random size and magnitude, making a new twist on the ancient past. I will review recent theory, simulations, and experiments that examine how interacting electrons manage to go the distance, being aided by external electric fields, quantum tunneling,and lattice vibrations.
