Physics Department Faculty:
Bertrand I. Halperin
Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural PhilosophyPhD 1965, UC-Berkeley
Bertrand Halperin's research interests include many aspects of the theory of condensed matter systems and statistical physics. A major portion of Halperin's current research involves the theory of electron states and transport in small particles of a metal or semiconductor. Much of this work has been motivated by experiments carried out in various laboratories at Harvard. Halperin is Scientific Director of the Harvard Center for Imaging and Mesoscale Systems (CIMS, www.cims.harvard.edu), which has been set up by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to encourage interdisciplinary research and education in this area.
Another major portion of Halperin's work concerns properties of two-dimensional electron systems at low temperatures in strong magnetic fields, or "quantum Hall systems". Experiments on these systems, since 1980, have revealed a succession of very surprising phenomena, which have required the introduction of a number of new theoretical methods for their explanation. Halperin has been involved in the development of several of these methods. A number of very puzzling experimental results still exist in this field, particularly in experiments involving bi-layer systems, which remain a challenge to theoretical understanding.
Other current interests include superconductivity, transport in inhomogeneous systems, and nuclear magnetic resonance experiments in porous media. Previous research interests have included quantum antiferromagnets in one and two dimensions, low-temperature properties of glasses, melting and other phase transitions in two-dimensional systems, and the theory of dynamic phenomena near a phase transition.
- B. I. Halperin, A. Stern, and S. M. Girvin, "dc voltage step-up transformer based on a bilayer v = 1 quantum Hall system, Phys. Rev. B 67: 235313 (2003).
- Y. Tserkovnyak, B. I. Halperin, O. M. Auslaender, and A. Yacoby, "Finite-size effects in tunneling between parallel quantum wires," Phys. Rev. Lett. 89: 136805 (2002).
- B. I. Halperin, A. Stern, Y. Oreg, J. H. Cremers, J. A. Folk, and C. M. Marcus, "Spin-orbit effects in a GaAs quantum dot in a parallel magnetic field," Phys. Rev. Lett. 86: 2106 (2001).
- B.I. Halperin, P.A. Lee, and N. Read, "Theory of the half-filled Landau level." Phys. Rev. B 47: 7312 (1993).
- B.I. Halperin, "Statistics of quasiparticles and the hierarchy of fractional quantized Hall states." Phys. Rev. Lett. 52: 1583 (1984).
- B.I. Halperin and D.R. Nelson, "Theory of two-dimensional melting." Phys. Rev. B 41: 121 (1978).