This article lists the main historical events in the history of condensed matter physics. This branch of physics focuses on understanding and studying the physical properties and transitions between phases of matter. Condensed matter refers to materials where particles (atoms, molecules, or ions) are closely packed together or under interaction, such as solids and liquids. This field explores a wide range of phenomena, including the electronic, magnetic, thermal, and mechanical properties of matter.
Even if material properties were modeled before 1900, condensed matter topics were considered as part of physics since the development of quantum mechanics and microscopic theories of matter. According to Philip W. Anderson, the term "condensed matter" appeared about 1965.[1]
6th century BC – Thales of Miletus observes that rubbing fur on various substances, such as amber, would cause an attraction between the two, which is now known to be caused by static electricity.[6][7]
160 AD – Claudius Ptolemy writes his book Optics on reflection and refraction of light, and tabulated angles of refraction for several media. He found a refraction law valid for small angles.[10]
1781– René Just Haüy (often termed the "Father of Modern Crystallography"[17]) discovers that crystals always cleave along crystallographic planes. Based on this observation, and the fact that the inter-facial angles in each crystal species always have the same value, Haüy concluded that crystals must be periodic and composed of regularly arranged rows of tiny polyhedra (molécules intégrantes). This theory explained why all crystal planes are related by small rational numbers (the law of rational indices).[18][19]
1840 – James Prescott Joule formulates the equation for Joule heating quantifying the amount of heat produced in a circuit as proportional to the product of the time duration, the resistance, and the square of the current passing through it.[29]
1897 – J. J. Thomson's experimentation with cathode rays led him to suggest a fundamental unit more than a 1,000 times smaller than an atom, based on the high charge-to-mass ratio. He called the particle a "corpuscle", but later scientists preferred the term electron.[51]
Wilhelm Lenz describes for the first time the Ising model as a model for magnetism in matter.
1923 – Pierre Auger discovers the Auger effect, where filling the inner-shell vacancy of an atom is accompanied by the emission of an electron from the same atom.
Walter Heitler uses Schrödinger's wave equation to show how two hydrogen atom wavefunctions join, with plus, minus, and exchange terms, to form a covalent bond.
Robert S. Mulliken works, in coordination with Hund, to develop a molecular orbital theory where electrons are assigned to states that extend over an entire molecule and, in 1932, introduces many new molecular orbital terminologies, such as σ bond, π bond, and δ bond.
Landau formulates the concept of Landau quantization, explaining the diamagnetic contribution of a free electron gas (Landau diamagnetism) and predicting the De Haas–Van Alphen effect. This effect was measured a few months after by Wander Johannes de Haas and his student Pieter M. van Alphen.
^Brock, H. (1910). The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company.
^Haüy, R.J. (1782). Sur la structure des cristaux de grenat, Observations sur la physique, sur l’histoire naturelle et sur les arts, XIX, 366-370
^Haüy, R.J. (1782). Sur la structure des cristaux des spaths calcaires, Observations sur la physique, sur l’histoire naturelle et sur les arts. XX, 33-39
^Pasteur, L. (1848). Mémoire sur la relation qui peut exister entre la forme cristalline et la composition chimique, et sur la cause de la polarisation rotatoire (Memoir on the relationship that can exist between crystalline form and chemical composition, and on the cause of rotary polarization), Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences (Paris), 26 : 535–538
^Bravais, A. (1850). Mémoire sur les systèmes formés par des points distribués regulièrement sur un plan ou dans l’espace, J. l’Ecole Polytechnique 19, 1
^ abcdefgPeacock, Kent A. (2008). The Quantum Revolution: A Historical Perspective. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 175–183. ISBN9780313334481.
^Encyclopaedia of Physics (2nd Edition), R. G. Lerner, G. L. Trigg, VHC publishers, 1991, ISBN (Verlagsgesellschaft) 3-527-26954-1, ISBN (VHC Inc.) 0-89573-752-3.
^Peierls, Rudolf Ernst (1985). Bird of passage: recollections of a physicist. Princeton paperbacks. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. ISBN978-0-691-08390-2.
^E. I. Rashba and V. I. Sheka, Fiz. Tverd. Tela – Collected Papers (Leningrad), v.II, 162-176 (1959) (in Russian), English translation: Supplemental Material to the paper by G. Bihlmayer, O. Rader, and R. Winkler, Focus on the Rashba effect, New J. Phys. 17, 050202 (2015), http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/17/5/050202/media/njp050202_suppdata.pdf.
^Kamenev, Alex (2011). Field theory of non-equilibrium systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521760829. OCLC721888724.
^W. A. Little and R. D. Parks, “Observation of Quantum Periodicity in the Transition Temperature of a Superconducting Cylinder”, Physical Review Letters9, 9 (1962), doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.9.9
^Slyusar, V.I. (October 6–9, 2009). Metamaterials on antenna solutions(PDF). 7th International Conference on Antenna Theory and Techniques ICATT’09. Lviv, Ukraine. pp. 19–24.