Field Theories of High Temperature Superconductors

Professor Fradkin plans to study the possible ground states of field theoretic models of High Temperature Superconductors. In particular, he will consider models with broken parity or time reversal invariance (or both). He will derive effective theories for the low energy degrees of freedom and derive their phenomenology. He will look for possible topological terms. Professor Fradkin will also consider a system of anyons, excitations with fractional statistics, their relation with frustrated spin models and their phenomenology, vortices, and mixed state. These results will be compared with the predictions resulting from a study of "conventional" BCS superconductors with broken time reversal invariance.