Vidhyadhiraja N S

Materials, for which a single-particle description of electronic properties fails, are classified as correlated electron systems. These materials exhibit a wide range of phenomena such as high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates, heavy fermions in lanthanides/actinides, colossal magnetoresistance in manganites, and metal-insulator transitions in transition metal oxides. In recent years, technological interest in these materials has been resurgent, which stems from the extraordinary sensitivity of transport and thermodynamic properties in these materials to external parameters such as temperature, pressure, and doping. Despite decades of research in this area, enormous challenges remain for theoreticians and experimentalists. Our group employs techniques of quantum many-body theory to understand these materials in the framework of simple models; the focus being to address issues relating to transport and thermodynamics, especially of heavy fermion systems and transition metal oxides.