CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS SEMINAR
                     Monday, February 11, 2002
           4:10 pm, Room 224 Physics-Astronomy Building



  "Superconductivity in Moth Balls: Surprises in Organic Transistors"

                            Jairo Sinova
                   University of Texas at Austin

Plastics are everywhere. Their influence has even reached with full force
the once thought impenetrable field of high quality micro-electronics.
An all plastic solar cell, smart paper, and all plastic displays
are not a matter of futuristic daydreaming, they are a present reality.
However exciting this realm of technology is, it has not drawn a lot of
attention from the physics community in the past.

This lack of interest came to an abrupt end when recent experiments at
Lucent showed an unprecedented richness of electronic collective effects
in a single organic based transistor.  By simply changing the gate voltage
one can take the system from the fractional quantum Hall regime,
where one observes many strange things such as fractional statistics and
fractional charge, to the superconducting regime, the ultimate
collaboration effort between electrons! I introduce here an overview of
some of the experimental findings by the Lucent group and our theoretical
efforts to understand the superconducting regime at the higher carrier
densities.

The novelty here is having 2D band quasi-particles and 3D vibrations of
the host molecular crystal coupled together through the so called
Su-Schrieffer-Heeger mechanism used previously in 1D organic chains.
The results obtained from this simple model are in agreement with
experiments and predict a sensitivity of the SC critical temperature
to applied pressure different from other materials.