DCMP & DCOMP Prize Session

The study of the cuprate high temperature superconductors has been one of the central focusses of condensed matter research for much of the past four decades.  Although in the long-term, possibly the most important outcome of this endeavor has been an explosion of new, and newly refined experimental methods for probing diverse properties of quantum materials, I will focus primarily on theoretical progress.  Specifically, I will discuss some of the basic progress that has been made in understanding various essential features of the physics of the cuprates, but will also outline some theoretical developments that, even if they do not ultimately prove relevant to the cuprates per se, have transformed our understanding of emergent phenomena in highly correlated quantum systems more generally.  Finally, I will speculate about what I consider to be promising directions for unraveling some of the remaining big open problems in the field. 

My work in this fied has been carried out with numerous brilliant students, post docs, and other collaborators - too many to list here.  However, special acknowledgement is appopriate of my long-term collaborators on this body of work, Eduardo Fradkin and the late Vic Emery.