Condensed Matter Seminars

Recent advances in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) have shown that a variety of exotic related phenomena, involving spins and anisotropic interactions, can be realized in atomically flat (MBE grown) thin metal films due to a nontrivial interplay of structural and electronic self-organization. The two of these phenomena will be discussed in my talk: anisotropic Kondo-like "confinement" in metallic quantum wells, and unidirectional charge ordering (CDW stripes) on metal surfaces. In all studied cases, we observe the formation of wire-like objects, where the long-range electronic coherence is spontaneously confined to a single degree of freedom.