This article lists the main historical events in the history of condensed matter physics. This branch of physics focuses on understanding and studying the physical properties and transitions between phases of matter. Condensed matter refers to materials where particles (atoms, molecules, or ions) are closely packed together or under interaction, such as solids and liquids. This field explores a wide range of phenomena, including the electronic, magnetic, thermal, and mechanical properties of matter.
This timeline includes developments in subfields of condensed matter physics such as theoretical crystallography, solid-state physics, soft matter physics, mesoscopic physics, material physics, low-temperature physics, microscopic theories of magnetism in matter and optical properties of matter and metamaterials.
Even if material properties were modeled before 1900, condensed matter topics were considered as part of physics since the development of quantum mechanics and microscopic theories of matter. According to Philip W. Anderson, the term "condensed matter" appeared about 1965.
For history of fluid mechanics, see timeline of fluid and continuum mechanics.
Before quantum mechanics
Prehistory 28,000–12,000 BP – Upper Paleolithic: earliest evidence of ceramic objects made for ritual purposes. 10,000–3300 BC – Neolithic: development of pottery, as well as early evidence of glass production and metalworking. 3300–1200 BC – Bronze Age: development of metallurgy, with copper and tin being combined to create bronze. 1200–300 BC – Iron Age: development of ferrous metallurgy, allowing iron and steel to largely replace bronze.
Antiquity
8th century BC: first writings on the magnetic properties of lodestone in Ancient Greece. 6th century BC – Thales of Miletus observes that rubbing fur on various substances, such as amber, would cause an attraction between the two, which is now known to be caused by static electricity. 5th century BC – Leucippus and Democritus postulate the philosophy of atomism. 4th century BC – Aristotle describes the composition of matter in terms of the four classical elements, founding Aristotelian physics. 1st century AD – Pliny the Elder in his Natural History records the story of Magnes the shepherd who discovered the magnetic properties of some iron stones. 160 AD – Claudius Ptolemy writes his book Optics on reflection and refraction of light, and tabulated angles of refraction for several media. He found a refraction law valid for small angles.
Classical theories before the 19th century 1611 – Johannes Kepler first states the Kepler conjecture about sphere packing in three-dimensional Euclidean space. It states that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling space has a greater average density than that of the cubic close packing (face-centered cubic) and hexagonal close packing arrangements. 1621 – Willebrord Snellius reformulates the laws of refraction and reflection of light into Snell's law. 1660 – Robert Hooke postulates the simplest equation of linear elasticity known as Hooke's law. 1687 – Isaac Newton postulates the Newton's laws of motion. 1701 – Newton studies heat, leading to Newton's law of cooling. 1729 – Scientist Stephen Gray discovers the electrical conduction of metals. 1778 – Diamagnetism was first discovered when Anton Brugmans observed in 1778 that bismuth was repelled by magnetic fields. 1781 – René Just Haüy (often termed the "Father of Modern Crystallography"Brock, H. (1910). The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company.) discovers that crystals always cleave along crystallographic planes. Based on this observation, and the fact that the inter-facial angles in each crystal species always have the same value, Haüy concluded that crystals must be periodic and composed of regularly arranged rows of tiny polyhedra (molécules intégrantes). This theory explained why all crystal planes are related by small rational numbers (the law of rational indices).Haüy, R.J. (1782). Sur la structure des cristaux de grenat, Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts, XIX, 366-370Haüy, R.J. (1782). Sur la structure des cristaux des spaths calcaires, Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts. XX, 33-39
19th century
1800 – The Voltaic pile, the first electric battery is developed by Alessandro Volta. 1803–1808 – John Dalton reconsiders the atomic theory of matter in order to understand chemistry. 1816 – David Brewster discovers stress birefringence in diamond. 1819 – Experimentally Pierre Louis Dulong and Alexis Thérèse Petit find that the specific heat capacity of solids was close to a constant value given by Dulong–Petit law. 1821 – Thomas Johann Seebeck discovers the thermoelectric effect, related by the Seebeck coefficient. 1822 – Joseph Fourier proposes Fourier's law of thermal conduction and the heat equation. 1826 – Moritz Ludwig Frankenheim derives the 32 crystal classes by using the crystallographic restriction, consistent with Haüy's laws, that only 2, 3, 4 and 6-fold rotational axes are permitted.Frankenheim, M.L. (1826). Crystallonomische Aufsätze, Isis (Jena) 19, 497-515, 542-565 1827 – Georg Ohm, publishes the proportional relation between electric current and voltage in metals, known as Ohm's law. 1834 – Jean-Charles Peltier discovers the Peltier effect: heating by an electric current at the junction of two different metals. 1839 – William Hallowes Miller invents zonal relations by projecting the faces of a crystal upon the surface of a circumscribed sphere. Miller indices are defined which form a notation system in crystallography for planes in crystal (Bravais) lattices.Miller, W.H. (1839). A Treatise on Crystallography, Deighton-Parker, Cambridge, London 1840 – James Prescott Joule formulates the equation for Joule heating quantifying the amount of heat produced in a circuit as proportional to the product of the time duration, the resistance, and the square of the current passing through it. 1845 – Michael Faraday studies the interaction of light and magnetic fields with matter (Faraday rotation). 1848 – Louis Pasteur discovers that sodium ammonium tartrate can crystallize in left- and right-handed forms and showed that the two forms can rotate polarized light in opposite directions. This was the first demonstration of molecular chirality, and also the first explanation of isomerism.Pasteur, L. (1848). Mémoire sur la relation qui peut exister entre la forme cristalline et la composition chimique, et sur la cause de la polarisation rotatoire (Memoir on the relationship that can exist between crystalline form and chemical composition, and on the cause of rotary polarization), Comptes rendus de l'Académie des sciences (Paris), 26 : 535–538 1850 – Auguste Bravais develops the concept of Bravais lattices to describe periodicity in crystals. He derives the 14 space lattices.Bravais, A. (1850). Mémoire sur les systèmes formés par des points distribués regulièrement sur un plan ou dans l'espace, J. l'Ecole Polytechnique 19, 1 1853 – Discovery of Wiedemann–Franz law relating thermal and electrical conductivities, by Gustav Wiedemann and Rudolph Franz. 1854 – Lord Kelvin discovers the thermoelectric Thomson effect. 1859 – Gustav Kirchhoff introduces the concept of a blackbody and proves that its emission spectrum depends only on its temperature. 1861–1865 – James Clerk Maxwell summarizes the fundamental equations of electromagnetism into an early version of Maxwell's equations and relates electromagnetism to light in his publications On Physical Lines of Force and A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. 1867 – Dmitry Chernov establishes the critical temperatures of steel. 1872 – The Boltzmann transport equation, describing the statistical behaviour of a thermodynamic system not in a state of equilibrium, is devised by Ludwig Boltzmann.Encyclopaedia of Physics (2nd Edition), R. G. Lerner, G. L. Trigg, VHC publishers, 1991, ISBN (Verlagsgesellschaft) 3-527-26954-1, ISBN (VHC Inc.) 0-89573-752-3. 1872 – Ludvig Lorenz finds the Lorenz number, the constant of the Wiedemann–Franz law. 1874 – Karl Ferdinand Braun discovered current rectification using a point-contact metal–semiconductor junction. 1875 – John Kerr discovers the double refraction of solid and liquids, now known as the Kerr effect. 1876 – Josiah Willard Gibbs introduces the concept of phase transition. 1879 – Edwin Hall discovers the Hall effect. 1879 – Leonhard Sohncke lists the 65 crystallographic point systems using rotations and reflections in addition to translations.Sohncke, L. (1879). Entwickelung einer Theorie der Krystallstruktur, B.G. Teubner, Leipzig 1880 – The first demonstration of the direct piezoelectric effect by the brothers Pierre Curie and Jacques Curie. 1883 – Thomas Edison discovers thermionic emission or the Edison effect. 1887 – Floris Osmond names the phases of steel. 1887 – Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect. 1888–1889 – Crystalline optical properties of liquid crystals and their ability to flow are first described by Friedrich Reinitzer and confirmed by Otto Lehmann. 1891 – Derivation of the 230 space groups (by adding mirror-image symmetry to Sohncke's work) by a collaborative effort of Evgraf Fedorov and Arthur Schoenflies.Fedorov, E. (1891). The symmetry of regular systems of figures, Zap. Miner. Obshch. (Trans. Miner. Soc. Saint Petersburg) 28, 1-146Schoenflies, A. (1891). Kristallsysteme und Kristallstruktur. B. G. Teubner 1895 – Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers X-rays in experiments with electron beams in plasma. 1895 – Hendrik Lorentz derives the Lorentz force for charged particles in electric and magnetic fields. 1895 – Pierre Curie discovers empirically that the magnetic susceptibility of many materials is inversely proportional to temperature according to Curie's law. He also found that permanent magnetism was lost after a certain Curie temperature. 1896–1897 – Pieter Zeeman first observes the Zeeman splitting effect by applying a magnetic field to light sources. 1897 – J. J. Thomson's experimentation with cathode rays led him to suggest a fundamental unit more than a 1000 times smaller than an atom, based on the high charge-to-mass ratio. He called the particle a "corpuscle", but later scientists preferred the term electron.
20th century
Early 1900s 1900 – Max Planck uses for the first time quantum theory to explain black-body radiation. 1900 – Paul Drude proposes the Drude model to explain thermal and electric properties of metals. 1901 – Thermionic emission is first theoretically modeled by Owen Willans Richardson 1905 – Albert Einstein's Annus mirabilis papers postulating special relativity, the theory for Brownian motion and explaining the photoelectric effect using quantum mechanics. 1905 – Paul Langevin derives the classical theory for diamagnetism. 1907: Einstein solid model predicts the deviations for the specific heat of solids from Dulong–Petit law. The first theory describing crystallographic defects is developed by Vito Volterra. Pierre Weiss introduces the magnetic domain theory of ferromagnetism. 1909 – Lorentz develops the classical Lorentz oscillator model to describe the optical response of materials. 1911: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and Gilles Holst discover superconductivity in mercury. The electron hole concept is pioneered by Karl Baedeker to understand semiconductors. 1912: Max von Laue discovers diffraction of X-rays by crystals. Peter Debye develops a model for the specific heat of solids in terms of phonons, known as Debye model. Geertruida Lorentz, applies Einstein's Brownian motion equations to noise in electrical circuits. 1913 – William Henry Bragg and Lawrence Bragg use X-rays to analyze crystals. 1917 – Weiss and Auguste Piccard first observe the magnetocaloric effect.