Ph.D. UC Santa Barbara, 1986
I am primarily interested in theories of strongly correlated quantum systems, particularly in low dimensions where quantum fluctuations can lead to interesting and exotic new states of matter. Examples of such systems include the fractional quantum Hall effect, in which a two-dimensional gas of electrons in a perpendicular magnetic field condenses into an incompressible quantum fluid whose elementary excitations exhibit fractional charge and statistics, and low-dimensional quantum antiferromagnets such as CsNiCl3, where quantum fluctuations at T = 0 rise to highly correlated ground states very different than the classical Néel state. Extensions of these models to include SU(N) spins (N > 2) or multicomponent quantum Hall systems open up additional possibilities, some of which can be probed experimentally, as in recent experimental work on double well quantum Hall systems. I have also been interested in the effects of disorder and spin-orbit coupling on transport in the quantized Hall regime, and on some related problems of localization physics.
Selected Publications:
Extended Heisenberg Models of Antiferromagnetism: Analogies to the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. With A. Auerbach, and F.D.M. Haldane. Phys. Rev. Lett. 60, 531 (1988).
Phase Space Localization: Topological Aspects of Quantum Chaos. With P. Leboeuf, J. Kurchan, and M. Feingold. Phys. Rev. Lett. 65, 3076 (1990).
SU(2n) Quantum Antiferromagnets with Exact C-Breaking Ground States. With I. Affleck, D.P. Arovas, J.B. Marston and D. Rabson. Nucl. Phys. B 366, 467 (1991).
Exact Questions to Some Interesting Answers in Many Body Physics. With S.M. Girvin. Recent Progress in Many Body Theories, Vol. 3, (Plenum, 1992, C. Campbell and E. Krotscheck, eds.), pp. 315-344.
"Effective Field Theory of Electron Motion in the Presence of Random Magnetic Flux", S.-C. Zhang and D. P. Arovas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 1886 (1994).
"Nonlinear I(V) Characteristics of Luttinger Liquids and Gated Hall Bars" ,S. R. Renn and D. P. Arovas, Physical Review B 51, 16832 (1995).
"Tetrakis(dimethylamino)ethylene-C60: Multicomponent Superexchange and Mott--Ferromagnetism", D. P. Arovas and A. Auerbach, Physical Review B 52, 10114 (1995).
"Thermodynamics for Fractional Exclusion Statistics", S. B. Isakov, D. P. Arovas, J. Myrheim, and A. P. Polychronakos, Physics Letters A212, 299 (1996).
"Dynamical Vortices in Superfluid Films", D. P. Arovas, J. Freire, and S. R. Renn, Physical Review B 55, 1068 (1997).