Abstract
Given the difficulties that we have encountered in our studies of molecular physics, it might seem that investigations of macroscopic objects like crystals would be completely intractable. After all Avogadro’s number is so large that even a piece of material the size of a grain of rice contains something like 1019 atoms. Coping with numbers of that size is clearly beyond the capability of any computer in existence or planned for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to deal with such systems by exploiting the symmetries available in crystals.
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Notes
- 1.
Bravais published “Mémoire sur les systèmes formés par des points distribués regulièrement sur un plan ou dans l’espace” in the Journal de L’Ecole Polytechnique.
- 2.
Penrose published “The rôle of aesthetics in pure and applied mathematics” in the Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
- 3.
Shechtman and his collaborators published “Metallic phase with long range orientational order and no translation symmetry,” in the Physical Review Letters in 1984. Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011 “for his discovery of quasicrystals.”
- 4.
Bloch published “Über die Quantenmechanik der Elektronen in Kristallgittern” in the Zeitschrift für Physik.
- 5.
Eugene Wigner and Frederick Seitz published “On the constitution of metallic sodium” in the Physical Review in 1933.
- 6.
Binnig and Rohrer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 “for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope.” They shared the prize with Ernst Ruska, who was cited “for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope.”
- 7.
Binnig, Quate and Gerber published “Atomic force microscope” in the Physical Review Letters in 1986. They were awarded the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2016 “”for the invention and realization of atomic force microscopy, a breakthrough in measurement technology and nanosculpting that continues to have a transformative impact on nanoscience and technology.”
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Geim, Novoselov and colleagues published “Electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films,” in Science in 2004 and “Two-dimensional gas of massless Dirac fermions in graphene” in Nature in 2005. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.”
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- 10.
Kamerlingh Onnes published his results in the Communications of the Physics Laboratories of the University of Leiden. Most were then reprinted in the Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913 “for his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium.”
- 11.
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Cooper’s “Bound electron pairs in a degenerate Fermi gas” was published in the Physical Review.
- 14.
Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”
- 15.
Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer published “Microscopic theory of superconductivity” as a Letter to the Physical Review and an expanded “Theory of superconductivity” later in 1957. The three were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 “for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory.”
- 16.
Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 “for their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials.” The award came just a year after they published “Possible high T c superconductivity in the BaLaCuO system” in the Zeitschrift für Physik B.
- 17.
Anderson’s “The resonating valence bond state in La2CuO4 and superconductivity” appeared in Science in 1987. Monthoux, Balatsky and Pines published “Toward a theory of high-temperature superconductivity in the antiferromagnetically correlated cuprate oxides” in the Physical Review Letters in 1991.
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© 2018 Mark A. Cunningham
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Cunningham, M.A. (2018). On Solids. In: Beyond Classical Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63160-8_8
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