Alan T. Dorsey
Professor and Chair
Education
PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1987)Research Group
Condensed Matter TheoryResearch Interest
Interests include: the discovery of superconductivity at liquid nitrogen temperatures in the cuprate superconductors has stimulated tremendous interest in the magnetic properties of these materials. Understanding these properties poses a considerable theoretical challenge, as we are confronted with the competing effects of thermal fluctuations, material anisotropy, and disorder; the manner in which this competition is resolved is a central theme in contemporary condensed matter physics. These are precisely the issues which are being addressed by Alan Dorsey's research on the transport properties of the vortex phase in the cuprate superconductors. His research has unveiled interesting scaling properties of transport coefficients such as the electrical conductivity; these scaling theories are now commonly used by experimentalists to analyze the phase transitions which occur between different vortex phases (the vortex liquid to vortex glass transition, for instance). More recently he has been interested in the pseudogap regime of the underdoped cuprates, and has developed a theory of the effect of fluctuations of the phase of the order parameter on the quasiparticle properties.A second facet of Professor Dorsey's research involves understanding pattern formation in systems which are far from their equilibrium state. A familiar example is the dendritic (``snowflake'') growth of solids into their supercooled liquid phase. Similar complicated patterns are produced by the magnetic field in a superconductor, when the external field is changed abruptly. Professor Dorsey is developing models to understand the physical phenomena which control the dynamics of these magnetic field patterns in superconductors, using both analytical and numerical methods. He has also shown that interesting nonequilibrium phenomena occur on the edge of a two dimensional electron system in the quantum Hall regime---that such a system supports ``soliton'' excitations which propagate without dispersion.
Select Publications
A. D. Klironomos and A. T. Dorsey, “Vortex Lattice Structural Transitions: a Ginzburg-Landau Model Approach,”' Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 097002 (2003).T. L. Hughes, A. D. Klironomos, and A. T. Dorsey, “ 'Fingered' Patterns in Electron Droplets in Nonuniform Magnetic Fields,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 196802 (2003).
L. Radzihovsky and A. T. Dorsey, “Theory of Quantum Hall Nematics,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 216802 (2002).
C. Wexler and A. T. Dorsey, “Solitons on the edge of a two-dimensional electron system,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 620 (1999).
H.-J. Kwon and A. T. Dorsey, “The effect of phase fluctuations on the single-particle properties of the underdoped cuprates,” Phys. Rev. B 59, 6438 (1999).
A. T. Dorsey and R. E. Goldstein, “The shapes of flux domains in the intermediate state of type-I superconductors,” Phys. Rev. B 57, 3058 (1998).