In other news, Piers Coleman just treated us today to a fascinating talk on “Spinors, Strings and Superconductors: Challenges of new era in Condensed Matter Physics”. He showed how frustration can lead to the emergence of exotic order parameters in low-dimensional magnets that might have appeared to lack long-range order. He also discussed a recent, fascinating proposal for the nature of the “hidden” order in URu2Si2 (one of the longest-standing challenges in condensed matter theory): hastatic order, a form of broken symmetry that would, unusually, mix states with integer and half-integer spin.
Views from Condensed Matter – by Jorge Quintanilla