A beautiful day on the Adriatic. The Abdus Salam Institute for Theoretical Physics is set on the Adriatic coast, just outside the old Austrian-Hungarian port-city of Trieste. The central lecture Hall of the ICTP is an impressive room - dating back to the 1960's, this lecture Hall was constructed not long after the United Nations building in Manhattan, and though unused, one can still see the simultaneous translation booths. There is a long black-board for the rpesentation of ideas and calculations, above which there are two large screens for the more modern form of power-point presentation.
The first day of the meeting focussed mainly on f-electron materials. 4f and 5f electron materials provide an exciting platform for research in strongly correlated materials. While the characteristic energy scales of these materials are probably too small for practical room-temperature applications, it is this very feature that makes it possible to tune their properties by pressure and magnetic fields. This, combined with their high purity, makes them an important research platform for studying the physics of strongly correlated electron materials.
Physicists met at the International Center for Theoretical Physics to discuss the challenges of understanding and designing strongly correlated electron materials - novel kinds of order, magnetism and superconductivity. The meeting was funded by the ICTP, the NSF, the ESF, ICAM and RIKEN.
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