Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Abstract

Fun with Dirac-like Quasiparticles in a d-wave Superconductor

Phuan Ong
Dept. of Physics, Princeton University

December 10, 2001

In a superconductor, a fraction of the Cooper pairs exist as `broken pairs', or quasiparticles. In the cuprates, the quasiparticle (qp) population remains large even at low temperatures because of the existence of nodes in the d-wave gap. Near the nodes, the qp dispersion is Dirac-like. I will provide a pedagogical discussion of what is currently known about the d-wave qps and describe a few experiments that probe their transport properties.


Dept. of Physics & Astronomy / Colloquium / physdept@usc.edu