Wednesday, September 5, 2012

RVB history and citations

In a talk he gave for a UC Davis Physics Colloquium in 2008 Sriram Shastry describes the background to his discovery of the Shastry-Sutherland lattice model [published in Physica B!] and spinons in the Majumdar-Ghosh model. [He received the 2009 Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society for this work].
Anderson (1973) Cambridge preprint!!
Revived Pauling’s idea on resonance and gave a rather poor energy gs for Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the triangular lattice:
He did not fool us with the poor numbers emerging from his calculation: We were thoroughly impressed in 1973 by the originality and depth of his ideas!!
However, we were in a minority since there are only 5 or 6 other papers between 1973 and 1986 citing Anderson RVB, and 3 of them are mine and 2 by Anderson!!
It is worth noting that this 1973 paper now has more than 500 citations (in Scopus) and was the key idea behind Anderson's 1987 Science paper (5000+ citations). This is another example that citations on a 5 year time scale can be quite misleading about the significance of a piece of work.

1 comment:

  1. Do you have any papers that fall into this category?

    I would be interested to know of good people that aren't Anderson (and his few peers) for whom this index would fail, especially anywhere near as spectacularly as this (for instance a paper with >100 citations from >5 years, but only a few before).

    Interesting history.

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