Two‐dimensional metals are not truly metallic

When does a metal not act like one? When it is a two‐dimensional thin film at 0 K. So says a recent theory by Elihu Abrahams (Rutgers), Philip W. Anderson (Princeton and Bell Labs), Donald C. Licciardello (Princeton) and T. V. Ramakrishnan (on leave at Princeton from the Indian Institute of Technology). Their surprising prediction that thin films never exhibit true metallic conductivity, and the renormalization‐group scheme used to obtain this result, both created such a stir at the Gordon Conference on Quantum Liquids and Solids (held in July in Plymouth, N.H.) that next year’s conference may be heavily devoted to this topic. The work of the Rutgers–Bell–Princeton team (since dubbed “the gang of four”) is a further realization of the ideas of David Thouless (Yale) who had predicted nonmetallic behavior at low temperatures for thin wires whose impurity resistances exceeded 10 kilo‐ohms.

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