Shriram Ramanathan's group report on Bad-metal conductivity

April 14, 2014

Ramanathan group's Nature - Physics paper Origins of bad-metal conductivity and the insulator–metal transition in the rare-earth nickelates is discussed in a Phys Org news article. The news article explains that one of the defining properties of metals is that, the hotter the metal, the worse it conducts electricity. But while most metals obey this inverse relationship between temperature and conductivity in a straightforward way as predicted by theory, other metals do not. At high temperatures, the electrons in these so-called "bad metals" ought to violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle so that the metals no longer conduct electricity. However, experiments have shown that these metals do continue to conduct electricity at high temperatures. The failure of current models to explain this behavior is a central problem in condensed matter physics. Ramanathan's group has have proposed an explanation of the origins of bad metal conductivity that obeys the uncertainty principle. Read more at: