research interests

• Mesoscopic physics; mesoscopic superconductivity and magnetism; hybrid structures
• Quantum phase transitions; superconductor-insulator and metal-insulator transitions
• Quantum electron kinetics, electronic transport in low-dimensional systems
• Dynamics of disordered media and glasses; nonequilibrium stochastic dynamics
• Vortex physics: pinning, dynamics, and related phenomena
• Physics of fractures and fatigue, crack propagation, dislocation dynamics
• Soft condensed matter, physics of granular materials

research highlights

Transport Properties of Granular Metals

Granular metals exhibit a wealth of behaviors generic to strongly interacting disordered electronic systems and offer a unique experimental tool for studying the interplay between the effects of disorder and interactions. Depending on the strength of coupling between the grains these systems can assume either insulating- or metallic phases. [more information.....]

Nanoscale superconductor as a ballistic quantum switch

   
A rich variety of vortex structures appear in mesoscopic superconductors in which only a few quanta of magnetic flux are trapped. The quasiparticle excitations in the vortices form coherent quantum-mechanical states that offer the possibility of controlling the phase-coherent transport through the sample by changing the number of trapped flux quanta and their configuration. [more information.....]

Magnetic flux instabilities in type-II superconductors

The formation of a macroscopic current-carrying critical state in type II superconductors occurs via penetration of the magnetic flux front of pinned vortices from the surface of the sample. Recent advances in the magneto-optical imaging have revealed puzzling instabilities of the critical state, including magnetic macro-turbulence, kinetic front roughening, magnetic avalanches and dendritic-type instabilities. These phenomena display remarkable similarities with other dendritic structures in crystal growth, nonequilibrium chemical and biological systems, and crack propagation.
[more information.....]

collaborations

• Eugine Bezugly, Institute for Low Temperature Physics, Kharkov
• Gianni Blatter, ETH, Zürich
• Lev Bulaevskii, LANL
• Yaroslav Blanter, Delft University
• Konstantin Efetov, Bochum University
• Mikhail Feigel'man, Landau Institute
• Dmitri Feldman, Brown University
• Yuri Galperin, Oslo University
• Yuval Gefen, Weizmann Research Institute
• Dima Geshkenbein, ETH, Zürich
• Leonid Gorelik, Chalmers University of Technology and Goteborg Unviersity
• Alexander Gurevich, University of Wisconsin
• Frank Hekking, LPM2C, CNRS, Grenoble
• Peter Kes, Leiden University
• Jan Kierfeld, Max Planck Institute, Potsdam
• Nikolay Kopnin, Helsinki University
• Veniamin Kozub, A F Ioffe Institute
• Thomas Nattermann, Köln University
• Stefan Scheidl, Köln University
• Robert Shekhter, Chalmers University of Technology and Goteborg Unviersity
• Alexander Melnikov, Institute for Physics of Microstructures, Nizhny Novgorod
• Andrei Varlamov, Italian National Institute for Condensed Matter
• Eli Zeldov, Weizmann Research Institute