March 28, 2013

Speaker: Rachel Wortis, Trent University

Title: Disorder, Interactions and Zero-Bias Anomalies

Abstract: Many of the most interesting electronic behaviours arise in materials with strong electron-electron correlations. Many of these same materials are disordered either intrinsically or due to doping. The study of how electrons behave in the presence of both disorder and interactions has a long history, yet the regime of strong disorder and strong interactions remains poorly understood. The density of states is one measure of the electrons which is readily accessible to both theorists and experimentalists. The combination of disorder and interactions is known in a number of contexts to generate a feature in the density of states at the Fermi level, a zero-bias anomaly. Experiments on strongly correlated materials and recent numerical results on the Anderson-Hubbard model, however, show behaviour which is inconsistent with existing theoretical descriptions.

This talk will present progress towards a new framework for understanding zero-bias anomalies in strongly correlated systems.