My Random Walks in Anderson's Garden

Abstract

Anderson's Garden is a drawing presented to Philip W. Anderson on the eve of his 60th birthday celebration, in 1983. This cartoon (Fig. 1), whose author is unknown, succinctly depicts some of Anderson's pre-1983 works, as a blooming garden. As an avid reader of Anderson's papers, random walk in Anderson's garden had become a part of my routine since graduate school days. This was of immense help and prepared me for a wonderful collaboration with the gardener himself, on the resonating valence bond (RVB) theory of High Tc cuprates and quantum spin liquids, at Princeton. The result was bountiful - the first (RVB mean field) theory for i) quantum spin liquids, ii) emergent fermi surfaces in Mott insulators and iii) superconductivity in doped Mott insulators. Beyond mean field theory - i) emergent gauge fields, ii) Ginzbuerg Landau theory with RVB gauge fields, iii) prediction of superconducting dome, iv) an early identification and study of a non-fermi liquid normal state of cuprates and so on. Here I narrate this story, years of my gardening attempts and end with a brief summary of my theoretical efforts to extend RVB theory of superconductivity to encompass the recently observed very high Tc ~ 203 K superconductivity in molecular solid H2S at high pressures ~ 200 GPa.