Thirty Years of heavy Fermions: Scientific Setting for their Discovery and Partial Understanding

TL;DR

This paper reviews thirty years of heavy-fermion research, highlighting their discovery, key physical concepts, and current understanding of their properties and phases in condensed matter physics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the historical development, theoretical ideas, and unresolved questions in the study of heavy-fermions over three decades.

Findings

Heavy-fermions exemplify the use of continuity and analyticity in physics.

Understanding of their fermi-liquid phase and anisotropic superconductivity has advanced.

Unsolved issues remain in the field.

Abstract

Heavy-Fermions provide an extreme example of the utility of the idea of continuity and analyticity in physics. Their discovery and study in the past thirty years has added a fascinating chapter to condensed matter physics. I briefly review the origins of the heavy-fermion problem out of the study of magnetic moments in metals and the study of mixed-valent rare-earth compounds. I also review the principal ideas underlying the features understood in their fermi-liquid phase as well as in their anisotropic superconductivity. The unsolved issues are also briefly mentioned.