Tunneling into Correlated Quantum Systems

Michael R. Geller

Department of Physics and Astronomy

University of Georgia

Resistance measurements have long been used as a spectroscopy of condensed matter systems, as have other spectroscopies such as optical absorption. For example, a measurement of the electrical current between two conductors held at different potentials and separated by a thin tunneling barrier, yields information about the electronic quantum states in those conductors. In this talk I will describe a new way to understand, and calculate, the tunneling spectra of strongly correlated electron systems, systems in which the effects of electron-electron interaction are pronounced. Such a theory is needed to explain recent  easurements of tunneling into fractional quantum Hall effect systems.