Charge transport: from Faraday to Thouless
DIPC Seminars
- Speaker
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Raffaele Resta. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trieste
- When
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2017/02/10
13:00 - Place
- Donostia International Physics Center
- Add to calendar
-
iCal
The Faraday laws of electrolysis state (in modern terms)
that the charge transported by a solvated ion between two electrodes is an
integer multiple of the elementary charge e. But a liquid is an assembly of
nuclei and electrons: while the nuclear is charges can be considered as
point-like, the electronic charge is delocalized all over the cell. The moving
ions drag "some" charge, whose integrated value is nonetheless ill defined.
Ionic charges in solution can only be computed via some approximate formula,
and are /noninteger/. So why is the electrode-to-electrode transported charge
quantized? The answer (given by D. Thouless 1983) is in topology: I will give a
pedagogical (and personal) presentation of this outstanding finding.