Condensed matter physics

Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter. In particular it is concerned with the 'condensed' phases that appear whenever the number of constituents in a system is extremely large and the interactions between the constituents are strong. The most familiar examples of condensed phases are solids and liquids, which arise from the electromagnetic forces between atoms. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by using physical laws. In particular, they include the laws of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and statistical mechanics. Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter. In particular it is concerned with the 'condensed' phases that appear whenever the number of constituents in a system is extremely large and the interactions between the constituents are strong. The most familiar examples of condensed phases are solids and liquids, which arise from the electromagnetic forces between atoms. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by using physical laws. In particular, they include the laws of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and statistical mechanics. The most familiar condensed phases are solids and liquids while more exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at low temperature, the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms, and the Bose–Einstein condensate found in ultracold atomic systems. The study of condensed matter physics involves measuring various material properties via experimental probes along with using methods of theoretical physics to develop mathematical models that help in understanding physical behavior. The diversity of systems and phenomena available for study makes condensed matter physics the most active field of contemporary physics: one third of all American physicists self-identify as condensed matter physicists, and the Division of Condensed Matter Physics is the largest division at the American Physical Society. The field overlaps with chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology, and relates closely to atomic physics and biophysics. The theoretical physics of condensed matter shares important concepts and methods with that of particle physics and nuclear physics. A variety of topics in physics such as crystallography, metallurgy, elasticity, magnetism, etc., were treated as distinct areas until the 1940s, when they were grouped together as solid state physics. Around the 1960s, the study of physical properties of liquids was added to this list, forming the basis for the new, related specialty of condensed matter physics. According to physicist Philip Warren Anderson, the term was coined by him and Volker Heine, when they changed the name of their group at the Cavendish Laboratories, Cambridge from Solid state theory to Theory of Condensed Matter in 1967, as they felt it did not exclude their interests in the study of liquids, nuclear matter, and so on. Although Anderson and Heine helped popularize the name 'condensed matter', it had been present in Europe for some years, most prominently in the form of a journal published in English, French, and German by Springer-Verlag titled Physics of Condensed Matter, which was launched in 1963. The funding environment and Cold War politics of the 1960s and 1970s were also factors that lead some physicists to prefer the name 'condensed matter physics', which emphasized the commonality of scientific problems encountered by physicists working on solids, liquids, plasmas, and other complex matter, over 'solid state physics', which was often associated with the industrial applications of metals and semiconductors. The Bell Telephone Laboratories was one of the first institutes to conduct a research program in condensed matter physics. References to 'condensed' state can be traced to earlier sources. For example, in the introduction to his 1947 book Kinetic Theory of Liquids, Yakov Frenkel proposed that 'The kinetic theory of liquids must accordingly be developed as a generalization and extension of the kinetic theory of solid bodies. As a matter of fact, it would be more correct to unify them under the title of 'condensed bodies''. One of the first studies of condensed states of matter was by English chemist Humphry Davy, in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Davy observed that of the forty chemical elements known at the time, twenty-six had metallic properties such as lustre, ductility and high electrical and thermal conductivity. This indicated that the atoms in John Dalton's atomic theory were not indivisible as Dalton claimed, but had inner structure. Davy further claimed that elements that were then believed to be gases, such as nitrogen and hydrogen could be liquefied under the right conditions and would then behave as metals. In 1823, Michael Faraday, then an assistant in Davy's lab, successfully liquefied chlorine and went on to liquefy all known gaseous elements, except for nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. Shortly after, in 1869, Irish chemist Thomas Andrews studied the phase transition from a liquid to a gas and coined the term critical point to describe the condition where a gas and a liquid were indistinguishable as phases, and Dutch physicist Johannes van der Waals supplied the theoretical framework which allowed the prediction of critical behavior based on measurements at much higher temperatures.:35–38 By 1908, James Dewar and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes were successfully able to liquefy hydrogen and then newly discovered helium, respectively. Paul Drude in 1900 proposed the first theoretical model for a classical electron moving through a metallic solid. Drude's model described properties of metals in terms of a gas of free electrons, and was the first microscopic model to explain empirical observations such as the Wiedemann–Franz law.:27–29 However, despite the success of Drude's free electron model, it had one notable problem: it was unable to correctly explain the electronic contribution to the specific heat and magnetic properties of metals, and the temperature dependence of resistivity at low temperatures.:366–368 In 1911, three years after helium was first liquefied, Onnes working at University of Leiden discovered superconductivity in mercury, when he observed the electrical resistivity of mercury to vanish at temperatures below a certain value. The phenomenon completely surprised the best theoretical physicists of the time, and it remained unexplained for several decades. Albert Einstein, in 1922, said regarding contemporary theories of superconductivity that 'with our far-reaching ignorance of the quantum mechanics of composite systems we are very far from being able to compose a theory out of these vague ideas.'