download report - Sapienza
download report - Sapienza
download report - Sapienza
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Scientific Report 2007-2009<br />
Condensed matter physics and biophysics<br />
Condensed matter physics and biophysics<br />
Condensed matter physics has a strong tradition in the Physics Department of La <strong>Sapienza</strong>.<br />
More than 50 scientists, with permanent positions (assistant, associate and full professors) and<br />
30 affiliated researchers (mostly CNR staff) actively investigate different properties of hard, soft<br />
and bio matter, or export ideas developed in condensed matter to new frontiers. This group of<br />
scientist collaborates with about 20 post-docs and 25 Ph.D students enrolled in the Ph.D. school<br />
of the department.<br />
Let me guide you, with the help of the map shown in Figure below, through the several research<br />
lines which are particularly active at the present time within the Physics Department.<br />
One of the excellences of<br />
our Department is in statistical<br />
mechanics and physics<br />
of complex systems, a field<br />
which has developed from<br />
the ideas developed in the<br />
study of critical phenomena<br />
and self-similarty, back in<br />
the seventies. The science<br />
of complexity arises naturally<br />
from statistical mechanics<br />
after the fundamental<br />
change of paradigm with<br />
respect to the reductionist<br />
scientific vision stimulated<br />
by the critical phenomena<br />
studies. At the equilibrium<br />
point between order and disorder<br />
one can observe fluctuations<br />
at all scales and the<br />
system cannot be described<br />
any more with the usual formalism in which one tries to write simple equations for average quantities.<br />
From this conceptual grain many new concepts have developed which produced a revolution<br />
in our way of looking at nature and the offspring of these ideas are now blooming in the study of<br />
the most challenging open problems in statistical mechanic: scaling laws, renormalization group,<br />
fractal geometry, glassy and granular systems, complex liquids, colloids, high-T c superconductivity<br />
and many others.<br />
High T c superconductivity is actively studied theoretically and experimentally (see<br />
C1,C2,C3,C4,C5,C6). Experimental studies focus on material aspects, on how it is possible to<br />
optimize physical parameters by changing external conditions as the pressure, temperature and<br />
magnetic field, in addition to the chemical pressure and atomic disorder to obtain new materials<br />
with possibly better superconducting function (C4) and on the anomalous transport properties<br />
which characterize high-T c materials even in in their normal state (C5). Experimentalists also<br />
focus on the sub-THz, infrared and optical spectra of different oxide families, characterized by<br />
strong electron-electron and electron- phonon interaction to understand the exotic properties of<br />
these materials, which range from high-T c superconductivity to the formation of charge density<br />
waves, from the appearance of pseudogaps at remarkably high T to Mott transitions (C6). Several<br />
theoretical groups work on new superconducting materials, with different approaches. Under<br />
investigation is the possibility that the superconductivity transition could share a Berezinsky-<br />
<strong>Sapienza</strong> Università di Roma 47 Dipartimento di Fisica