Alex Zunger

Alex Zunger

Alex Zunger (born before 1975) is an Israeli - American physicist who specializes in computer simulation in materials science.

Zunger studied at Tel Aviv University with Joshua Jortner and Benyamin Englman. From 1975 to 1977 he was a post-doctoral student at Northwestern University with AJ Freeman and at the University of California, Berkeley with Marvin Cohen (on a scholarship from IBM ). from 1978 he was at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), where he founded and headed the solid state research group (until 2011). At the same time he became a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder . In 1984 he became a senior scientist at NREL and in 1991 an Institute Research Fellow. He is there today at the Institute for Inverse Design .

Since the late 1970s, Zunger has been a pioneer in the development of ab-initio pseudopotential methods in density functional theory with applications to real materials, for example in photovoltaics and semiconductor nanostructures. For example, in 1981 he developed the self- interaction correction with John Perdew and he is co-developer of the Momentum space total energy method (1978). Most recently he has been working on inverse band structure calculations, the application of quantum mechanical methods to synthesize materials with desired properties.

In 2001 he received the Aneesur Rahman Prize for pioneering work on the computational foundations of the ab initio theory of the electronic structure of solids . In 2009 he gave the Gutenberg lecture at the University of Mainz . In 2001 he received the Bardeen Award from TMS (The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society) for outstanding contributions to the understanding and prediction of spontaneous order in alloys . In 1999 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

Web links

• Rahman Price
• Gutenberg lecture Mainz

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Laudation: For his pioneering work on the computational basis for first-principles electronic structure theory of solids.