Great Questions and Challenges to Condensed Matter and Materials Physics

Proposed by Tony Leggett at the Solid State Science Committee’s CMMP2010 Roundtable Discussion on October 22, 2004.

1. Why do all amorphous materials behave in the same way below 1 K?

2. Can we build a robust room-temperature superconductor? How?

3. Does quantum mechanics fail at some level of size/complexity/organization?

4. If no to the last, are there any a priori limits on the degree of coherence we can attain with macroscopic degrees of freedom (e.g., SQUIDs)?

5. Is there a universal origin to 1/f noise?

6. Does nature exploit the phenomenon of entanglement, e.g., in biological processes?

7. Are there completely new types of order to be found in condensed-matter systems?