The Standard Model for Solids"
Marvin L. Cohen
Dept of Physics
Univ California
and
MSD,
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab,
Berkeley, CA
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WORLD YEAR OF PHYSICS:
International celebration of Einstein's miraculous year. The APS invites you to participate and help. |
WHERE IS PHYSICS GOING?
Should physics expand into other areas? Physics is the central science, and CMP can be a bridge to other fields. CMP is diverse and difficult to unify. should we celebrate our diversity instead of following the approaches of other areas? Should we encourage cross-dicipline teaching, mentoring, and collaborations in research? Biophysics and nanoscience are good prototype areas for exploring future fusions with other areas of science and engineering.
The plane wave pseudopotential method [pwpm] gives ground and excited state properties of a broad class of solids, clusters, molecules, and nanosystems. electronic, structural, vibrational, superconducting, optical, mechanical, and many other properties can be computed from first principles. New materials and their properties have been successfully predicted. some interesting new problems being explored are: peapods with silostructures, molecular devices based on transport through a single molecule, nanotube devices such as sensors, friction at the nanoscale to explain the new nanomotors smaller than viruses, the quasiparticle picture at the nanoscale, the physics of confinement and reduced dimensionality, superconductivity at the nanoscale, dealing with correlation effects for localized electronic states, excitons and optical properties in one and two dimensions, phonon renormalization and electron-phonon coupling in d-electron systems, etc.