Friday, November 14, 2008

Interesting read

I came across this interview with Peter Higgs (of the legendary Higgs Boson) and it was very interesting to note that he mainly credits his theory to Phillip Anderson. Infact to here are some interesting snippets from this article

"Once more help arrived from the condensed-matter community when, in 1963, Phil Anderson pointed out that the equivalent of a Goldstone boson in a superconductor could become massive due to its electromagnetic interactions. But did Anderson's argument apply in the relativistic case? No, said a paper by Walter Gilbert in an issue of Physical Review Letters that arrived in Edinburgh the middle of July. Yes, said Higgs, after thinking about it over the weekend."

and here is an quote from Higgs

""Anderson should have done basically the two things that I did," says Higgs. "He should have shown the flaw in the Goldstone theorem, and he should have produced a simple relativistic model to show it happened. However, whenever I give a lecture on the so-called Higgs mechanism I start off with Anderson, who really got it right, but nobody understood him."

You can read the complete article
  • here


  • Well it is friday had a couple of interesting seminars which I attended to but it is one of those day where after the talk you do feel a bit dumb/frustrated. On the good note atleast it made me go back and read about Kondo effect. In most pure metals the resistance is supposed to go down as temperature. It has the usual t power 2 and 5 dependence with an addition phonon contribution. In certain impure metals (impurity being magnetic) however the resistance shoots up at some region. This was first observed in 30s and I think a few decades later Jun Kondo explained it. Simplifying the work of Kondo we could explain the data by adding a log{1/T} dependense. This should give rise to a divergent term at T approches 0 but I guess Kondo effect only comes it for a particular region.It is one of interesting and the very first example of asymptotic freedom discovered in nature. I guess much earlier than the same description was applied to strong forces in elementary particles. Its odd than Jun Kondo has not been awarded Nobel proze yet.... For a good reading on Kondo effect there is a good article
  • here
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