High-temperature superconducting materials electron structure

What is most interesting about many of the new solid state materials are their electrical and magnetic properties. Chemists have to learn to measure these properties, not only to make the new materials and determine their structures. The history of the compounds that are at the center of today s exciting developments in high-temperature superconductivity makes this point very well. Chemists must be able to reason intelligendy about the electronic structure of the compounds they make in order to understand how these properties and structures may be tuned. In a similar way, the study of surfaces must perforce involve a knowledge of the electronic structure of... 

Many of the new tasks would be at the boundary with materials science. There are some that are obviously applications-oriented, like the electronic theory of high temperature superconduction in the layered copper-oxide perovskites, and other aspects of nanotechnology. There are also fundamental valence problems, such as accounting for the structures and properties of quasiciystals. Why is the association of transition metals and aluminium apparently of central importance How do we deal with the valence properties of systems where the free energy of formation or phase transition is dominated by the entropy term ... 

Mott insulators are a class of materials that should conduct electricity imder conventional band theories, but are insulators when measmed (particularly at low temperatures). This effect is due to electron-electron interactions which are not considered in conventional band theory. Mott insulators are of growing interest in advanced physics research, and are not yet fully imderstood. They have applications in thin-film magnetic hetero structures and high-temperature superconductivity, for example. 

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