New physics in the 90's: The case of hi-Tc superconductors

Abstract

The discovery of high T_c superconductors in 1986 continues to have enormous impact in condensed matter physics as well as other branches of physics. It is clear that the influence will continue as novel developments in the 90's. As in any fertile field of scientific activity, high temperature superconductivity has opened the doors and made inroads into understanding many new systems as well as old systems which we thought we had understood well, earlier. The distilled result of the intense study of strongly correlated electronics systems, from the point of view of high T_c superconductors, in the last 5 years or so will be reviewed. We will see how the notion of Resonating Valence Bond (RVB) state that is so familiar to quantum chemists in the case of small organic molecules gets generalized in a non-trivial way to macroscopic systems leading to new notions and rich physics such as spin-charge separation, tomographic Luttinger liquid, Chern Simons theory etc. We will also see how challenging questions are posed by the discovery of fullerene superconductors.