Thursday, June 23, 2011

Tailoring your talk (and abstract) to your audience

Previously I posted about the challenge of writing an effective talk abstract. Next week I am giving the Quantum Sciences Seminar at UQ. This is meant for mostly theorists working in quantum optics, BECs, quantum information, and condensed matter. Note the diverse audience. Below, I offer up for critique my abstract.
You can decide whether I was at all successful in pitching the abstract to my audience rather than just recycling one I used for a different more specialised audience. I have not prepared the talk yet. I will aim for the talk to be a less technical and specialised version of this one. Suggestions on how to do that are welcome.

Interlayer magnetoresistance as a probe of quantum coherence in layered metals

Many of the most scientifically interesting and technologically important electronic materials discovered in the past two decades have two common features:
a layered crystal structure and strong interactions between electrons.
Examples include the high-Tc cuprate superconductors and organic charge transfer salts.
Two fundamental questions about such layered metals concern the quantum coherence of interlayer charge transport and  the coherence of excited states (quasi-particles) within the layers.

I will describe the theory needed to describe the dependence of the interlayer magnetoresistance on the direction of the applied magnetic field [angle dependent magnetoresistance (ADMR)] in a wide range of materials. ADMR can be understood as a semi-classical effect or in terms of the Aharonov-Bohm effect [1].
However, there is a diverse range of strongly correlated electron materials for which
this theory fails, even on a qualitative level: the angular dependence is the opposite to
that expected from the Lorentz force law [F = q v x B].

I will discuss how ADMR is sensitive to anisotropies around an intralayer Fermi surface. Consequently, it has been used to determine anisotropies in the Fermi surface, interlayer hopping, and quasi-particle scattering rate [2,3]. On the other hand, ADMR is not very sensitive to the quantum coherence of the interlayer transport [3,4].

This talk is aimed to be at a tutorial level with an emphasis on open problems rather than a detailed technical discussion of my own recent contributions.

[1] B.K. Cooper and V.M. Yakovenko, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 037001 (2006).
[2] M. Abdel-Jawad et al., Nature Physics 2, 821 (2006).
[3] M.P. Kennett and R. H. McKenzie, Phys. Rev. B 76, 054515 (2007).
[4] P. Moses and R.H. McKenzie, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 4492 (1998).

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