Professor Stephen Blundell

Abstract:

On cooling through the transition temperature Tc of a conventional superconductor, an energy gap develops as the normal-state charge carriers form Cooper pairs; these pairs form a phase-coherent condensate that exhibits the well-known signatures of superconductivity: zero resistivity and the expulsion of magnetic flux (the Meissner effect). However, in many unconventional superconductors, the formation of the energy gap is not coincident with the formation of the phase-coherent superfluid. Instead, at temperatures above the critical temperature a range of unusual properties, collectively known as 'pseudogap phenomena', are observed. Here we argue that a key pseudogap phenomenon-fluctuating superconductivity occurring substantially above the transition temperature-could be induced by the proximity of a Mott-insulating state. The Mott-insulating state in the κ-(BEDT-TTF) 2X organic molecular metals can be tuned, without doping, through superconductivity into a normal metallic state as a function of the parameter t/U, where t is the tight-binding transfer integral characterizing the metallic bandwidth and U is the on-site Coulomb repulsion. By exploiting a particularly sensitive probe of superconducting fluctuations, the vortex-Nernst effect, we find that a fluctuating regime develops as t/U decreases and the role of Coulomb correlations increases. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group.

Abstract:

Magnetic materials in which the fundamental building block is molecular have attracted a great deal of interest because they capitalize on the flexibility inherent in carbon chemistry. Some compounds incorporating chemically stable free radicals are purely organic and show long-range magnetic order at very low temperatures, but the most useful molecular magnets incorporate transition metal or lanthanide ions, with the molecular groups providing a bridge to mediate exchange interactions between the ions. Some of these materials exhibit a spin crossover effect between low-spin and high-spin states. Other molecular magnets form model low-dimensional magnetic compounds that can be used to test models of quantum spin systems. Molecular nanomagnets are complex molecules containing a number of metal ions whose individual moments conspire to create a giant magnetic moment associated with the entire molecule. These systems can be used to exhibit quantum tunnelling of magnetization and are also candidate systems for quantum computing applications.

Abstract:

We present experimental evidence for a hitherto unconfirmed type of angle-dependent magnetoresistance oscillation caused by magnetic breakdown. The effect was observed in the organic superconductor κ- (BEDT-TTF)2 Cu (NCS)2 using hydrostatic pressures of up to 9.8 kbar and magnetic fields of up to 33 T. In addition, we show that similar oscillations are revealed in ambient-pressure measurements, provided that the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations are suppressed either by elevated temperatures or filtering of the data. These results provide a compelling validation of Pippard's semiclassical picture of magnetic breakdown. © 2007 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

We present a detailed muon spin relaxation (μ+SR) study of the spin-ice material Dy2Ti2O7. Polycrystalline samples of this material have been studied in the temperature range 0.02K

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