Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
Earth and Space Sciences Building, ESS 001
Friday, November 14, 2025
The cost of energy: Do electric vehicles save on the fuel cost?
Distinguished Professor Laszlo Mihaly
We will review the advent of hybrid cars and EVs, with special attention to the physics principles behind the emerging new technologies, including special areas from atomic physics, condensed matter physics and nuclear physics. We cover topics from magnetism, semiconductors and superconductivity. We discuss why rare earth elements are important, and why are they rare. We will answer the question posed in the title, and the answer will be "It depends".... We discuss technologies and policies that influence the answer.
Distinguished Professor Laszlo Mihaly received his PhD in 1977 at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. In addition to being a staff member at the Central Research Institute (Budapest), he held positions at the Institute Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, Universite Paris Sud in Orsay, and at UCLA. He joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook in 1989. He is an experimental condensed matter physicist, with research interests in superconductivity, magnetism, electrical transport and electron spin resonance.
