Joel Moore

LBNL Faculty Scientist
Associate Professor of Physics
University of California, Berkeley

jemoore@socrates.berkeley.edu
phone: 510-642-8313

Education
B.S., Physics, Princeton University
Ph.D, Physics, MIT
Postdoctoral fellow   Bell Labs

Major Awards
2007 Visiting Fellowship, JSPS
2003-04  Hellman Fellowship

General Research Interests
Theoretical condensed matter physics - the primary challenge of condensed matter is to understand how Maxwell's equations and quantum mechanics, the fairly simple "rules of the game," give rise to almost all of the complex phenomena we observe in nature. A succinct expression of this idea is More is different, the title of a 1972 Science article by Philip Anderson. Another thrust of condensed matter physics is to use what we have learned about collective states of electrons (or photons or atoms) to create devices, such as the transistor, laser, and SQUID, that have the potential to change lives.

Our primary interest is in properties of solids beyond the standard approximations of independent particles and perfect periodicity. For example, transport of heat, charge, and spin in materials would be dissipationless in the absence of defects and interparticle interactions. Understanding any many-electron ordered state (e.g., superconductivity and magnetism), and any transport experiment, requires theory beyond independent particles in a periodic potential.

A large part of our work concerns the various quantum states of strongly correlated electrons confined in
zero-, one-, and two-dimensional geometries. Especially interesting are the quantum phase transitions in such systems and the dramatic manifestations of charge quantization in single-molecule and single-electron devices. Work on these problems often connects with important questions and methods in other areas of physics, especially high-energy physics and "soft" condensed matter.

MSD Research Projects:

Nanostructured Materials for Thermoelectric Energy Conversion

Personal website:   http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jemoore/

Figure: The edge between an ordinary insulator and topological insulator can carry a dissipationless "spin current": the direction of motion of an electron along the edge is determined by its spin. 
Figure copyright 2008, Nature Publishing Group.