Peter Hirschfeld
Professor
Education
PhD Princeton University (1985)Research Group
Condensed Matter TheoryResearch Interest
Research interests include properties of heavy fermion and, more recently, high temperature cuprate superconductors. The heavy fermion materials are metals involving rare earth or actinide ions in which electrons behave as though they have masses much larger than their bare mass, sometimes as much as a proton mass. Transition temperatures are only about 1K. The cuprate materials, with Tc's of order 100K or above, typically have a layered perovskite structure, and superconductivity seems to be nearly 2D. In both classes of systems there is strong evidence that superconductivity is unconventional in the sense that the superconducting order parameter or pair wave function has symmetry less than the underlying crystal lattice. In particular it is now established that the cuprate materials have d-wave symmetry. Currently my research is focused on understanding the consequences of this symmetry, in particular the properties of nodal quasiparticles with "Dirac-like" spectrum. Current projects include: Transport in Unconventional Superconductors, Defects in Correlated Fermi Systems and Quantum Impurity Problems.Select Publications
"Elastic forward scattering in the cuprate superconducting state", Lingyin Zhu, P.J. Hirschfeld, and D.J. Scalapino, Phys. Rev. B 70, 214503 (2004)."Dopant-Modulated Pair Interaction in Cuprate Superconductors", T.S. Nunner, B.M. Andersen, A. Melikyan and P.J. Hirschfeld, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 177003 (2005).
"$0-\pi$ transitions in Josephson junctions with antiferromagnetic interlayers", B.M. Andersen, I. Bobkova, Yu. S. Barash, and P.J. Hirschfeld, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 117005 (2006).
"Local electronic structure near oxygen dopants in BSCCO-2212: a window on the high-$T_c$ pair mechanism?", Y. He, T.S. Nunner, P.J. Hirschfeld, and H.-P. Cheng, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 197002 (2006).