Bimal Sarma's interest in condensed matter is in the study of
materials in extreme environments -- at extremely low temperatures and extremely
high magnetic fields. The author of over 130 journal papers and a number of
review papers, Sarma has been principally concerned with the use of sound waves
to investigate phase transitions and the actual phases themselves in magnetic
systems and superconducting/superfluid systems. Sarma's landmark study of
heavy-fermion superconductors (with collaborators at Northwestern together with
Emeritus Professor Moises Levy and a group of students and post docs) showed the
existence of a metallic superconductor whose microscopic behavior does not
conform to the standard BCS model of electron-pairing. The work led to the
remarkable first discovery of multiple superconducting phases in a single
superconductor, the metal UPt3.
Sarma's work has spanned a wide arena of experimental physics. He received
his Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he worked on liquid crystals and
superfluid 3He. As a post doc at the Argonne National Lab, he carried
out neutron diffraction experiments from solid 3He at sub millikelvin
temperatures. Sarma and his students continue to collaborate with Northwestern
and Argonne, and his current studies involve high-Tc and
heavy-fermion superconductivity and the phases of materials in some of the
highest magnetic fields. This work has involved use of the High Field Magnet
Laboratory in Grenoble, France, and the still higher fields of the pulsed
magnets in Los Alamos and at Tallahassee. The group expects to develop a program
of ultrasonic measurements in intense fields.
Sarma's experimental group in solid-state physics at UWM has supported
graduate students and post docs with well over $1M in funding over the past
several years. The experimental facilities include a dilution refrigerator,
several magnets, and pulsed and cw ultrasonic equipment.
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