Friday, November 10, 2017, 3pm
Location: Planetary Hall Room 126
Darius
Torchinsky
Temple University
Department of Physics
Revealing
hidden symmetry breaking in strongly correlated matter
Abstract
Essential
to a microscopic understanding of strongly correlated materials is a
clear
picture of the relationship between their myriad quantum
ground states.
However, in phenomena ranging from unconventional magnetism to high
temperature
superconductivity, this picture is often obscured by
the presence of
broken symmetries hidden from view of existing experimental techniques.
This
may include hidden structural symmetries or tensor
order parameters
representing complex spatial arrangements of multipolar electric and
magnetic
moments. It may even include electronic forms of order which
come in and
out of existence on ultrashort timescales, invisible to static probes.
I will
demonstrate how ultrafast time resolved and nonlinear optical
methods can
reveal hidden symmetry breaking in some of the most intensely
researched
strongly correlated materials of the past decade, including
high-temperature superconductors, spin-orbit coupled transition metal
oxides
and heavy fermion materials, and I will discuss how the newly
uncovered symmetries
play a fundamental role in their physics.