(no subject)

I think I've settled on something I'm really interested in doing for the final project for Solid State. Given that these are to be either short papers or brief presentations (my understanding is that they'll be shorter than the typical 20 minute Swat seminar presentation), the project has to be relatively limited in scope. I'm currently interested in giving a talk on the phenomenology of the quantum Hall effect (QHE). There's a brief discussion in Kittel, and also in some books I perused in the library. I think it's not unreasonable to give a short experimental overview of the first measurement of of the integer QHE by Klitzing et al (PRL 45, 494, 1980). There are then a few things one could talk about -- a little something about Landau levels, perhaps, or the use of the QHE in defining a resistance standard or for measuring the fine-structure constant. There's also a fractional QHE, but the physics is different from the integer QHE and I doubt there would be time to discuss it except in passing.

I should still run this idea past Walter, but it's something I'm quite interesting. Now I should stop procrastinating from studying for the solid state exam.