Category: List of Bases 2009 Throughout the year RESEARCH IN CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS

Title:

JOINT ICTP/SISSA CONDENSED MATTER SEMINARS: "Re-Visiting Orbital Diamagnetism: A Surprise"

Start Time:

16:00

Location:

ICTP (Leonardo da Vinci Building Seminar Room)

Speaker(s):

N. Kumar (( Raman Research Institute, Bangalore )

Description:

It is generally known that the orbital diamagnetism of a classical system of charged particles in thermal equilibrium is identically zero - the Bohr-van Leeuwen theorem. Physically, this null result derives from the exact cancellation of the orbital diamagnetic moment associated with the complete cyclotron orbits of the charged particles by the paramagnetic moment subtended by the incomplete orbits skipping the boundary in the opposite sense. Motivated by this crucial, but subtle role of the boundary, wed have simulated here the case of a finite but unbounded system, namely that of a charged particle moving on the surface of a sphere in the presence of an externally applied uniform magnetic field. Following a real space-time approach based on the classical Langevin equation, we have computed the orbital magnetic moment which now indeed turns out to be non-zero, and has the diamagnetic sign. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of the possibility of finite classical diamagnetism in principle, and it is due to the avoided cancellation