Elena (Leni) Bascones
Tenured Scientist
Departament of Theory and Simulation of Materials
Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM)
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Contact
If you are interested in doing a Phd thesis or a postdoc in our group , contact me .
Research Interests
Electrons in solids feel the periodic potential of the atomic lattice. If the interaction between the electrons among themselves could be neglected and the atomic lattice could be assumed to be static the energy of the electrons would be mostly determined by this periodic potential. According to the laws of quantum mechanics the available energy levels for the electrons would organize into electronic bands possessing the symmetry of the lattice. This bands would be filled by the electrons following Pauli exclusion principle up to the Fermi level. If the Fermi level lies in the middle of an electronic band the system behaves as a metal, otherwise it is a semiconductor or an insulator. Electrons have negative charge and spin and interactions between them are always present. However in a large number of metals the picture above works well: interactions can be treated at a perturbative level or the energy levels renormalized to include their effect. The system is a Fermi liquid. On the contrary, there are some materials where correlations between electrons are strong enough to invalidate this picture. Many-body physics and cooperative phenomena enter into play. An expected normal metal can turn out into an insulator, a magnetic system or a superconductor, just to cite some of the possible states. Confinement is another way to modify the properties of a material. This is true for a system in which the electronic correlations are weak, but can have more dramatic effects when interactions are present. To study the effect of confinement has become possible in the last decades with the advent of nanoscience. My research is focused on the theoretical study of strongly correlated electron systems and nanostructures. Read more
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