APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research: The Metal-Insulator Transition in Strongly Interacting Electron Systems in Two Dimensions

Over the course of my long career in physics my research has covered a variety of topics, including early measurements of the resistance minimum that provided the experimental key to the Kondo effect, metal-insulator transitions (MIT)s and macroscopic quantum tunneling of the magnetization in molecular magnets. My work during the last few years has focused on the apparent metal-insulator transition that occurs in strongly interacting systems of electrons in two dimensions, where no metallic behavior and no metal-insulator transition were believed to be possible. In this talk I will give a thumbnail history of research on the 2D metal-insulator transition, the debate concerning whether a metallic phase exists in two dimensions, and whether this MIT is a quantum phase transition, as claimed by many (including me). I will report surprising results [1] that shed new light on the nature of the metal-insulator transition in 2D.

[1] Shiqi Li, Qing Zhang, Pouyan Ghaemi and M. P. Sarachik, Phys. Rev. B 99, 155302 (2019).