Dieter Vollhardt

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Dieter Vollhardt (born September 8, 1951 in Bad Godesberg ) is a German physicist and has been a professor in Augsburg since 1996 .

Life

Dieter Vollhardt studied physics at the University of Hamburg from 1971 to 1976 . This was followed by a three-year research stay with Kazumi Maki at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (USA) as a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation . During this time he worked on the theory of critical currents in superfluid helium 3, which was the subject of his diploma thesis (1977) and his doctorate (1979) at the University of Hamburg. From 1979 to 1984 he worked as a research assistant for Peter Wölfle and from 1984 to 1987 as a Heisenberg fellow of the DFG at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics (Heisenberg Institute) in Munich. During this time he worked for several guest stays at research institutes in the USA. a. at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara, and Bell Laboratories , Murray Hill. In 1984 he completed his habilitation at the Technical University of Munich with a thesis on the theory of correlated Fermi systems.

In 1987 Dieter Vollhardt was appointed to the chair for Theoretical Physics C and the position of director at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen . In 1996 he accepted a call to the new Chair for Theoretical Physics III (Electronic Correlations and Magnetism) established by the Free State of Bavaria at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Augsburg .

In 2006 Dieter Vollhardt was awarded the Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize 2006 of the European Physical Society for the development and application of the dynamic molecular field theory (together with Antoine Georges, Gabriel Kotliar and Walter Metzner).

On March 17, 2010, Dieter Vollhardt was awarded the Max Planck Medal , the highest award of the German Physical Society for achievements in theoretical physics. The physicist received this award “in recognition of his significant contributions to the derivation of a new meanfield theory of correlated quantum systems and to the understanding of many-particle problems in the quantum theory of condensed matter”. In 2011 he received the Ernst Mach Medal of Honor .

Vollhardt has been a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since March 2011 .

plant

Vollhardt has been concerned with superfluid helium 3 and its complicated phase structure since his diploma thesis and dissertation in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, among other things, with the theory of Anderson localization .

He is one of the founders of the dynamic molecular field theory (Dynamical Mean-Field Theory) for strongly correlated electronic systems in solid-state physics, such as transition metals (e.g. iron or vanadium) and their oxides, i.e. H. Materials with electrons in open d- and f-shells. These systems are characterized by the Coulomb repulsion of the electrons ( strong correlation of the electrons), which has the tendency to localize electrons in competition with the wave aspect of the electrons, which leads to a multitude of material- specific phenomena that one would like to understand better (like Mott- Isolator transitions). The usual band theory or density functional theory turned out to be inadequate there, and the much-studied modeling using the Hubbard model also often turned out to be not flexible enough. In 1989 Vollhardt and his doctoral student Walter Metzner introduced the borderline case of an electronic model with local interaction (Hubbard model) on a grid with an infinite number of neighbors, which Gabriel Kotliar and Antoine Georges developed into the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory. It can be understood as a self-consistent field-theoretical extension of an impurity model by Philip Warren Anderson , with a middle field that describes the coupling to an "electron bath". The combination of DMFT with conventional methods for calculating the electronic band structure, such as the Local Density Approximation (LDA) of the density functional theory , allows the microscopic calculation of the properties of materials with strongly correlated electrons.

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ W. Metzner, D. Vollhardt, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 62, 1989, p. 324, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.62.324 .
  2. ↑ G. Kotliar, A. Georges, Physical Review B, Vol. 45, 1992, p. 6479, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevB.45.6479
  3. ↑ Review article: A. Georges, G. Kotliar, W. Krauth, M. Rozenberg, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 68, 1996, p. 13, doi: 10.1103 / RevModPhys.68.13 .
  4. ↑ K. Held, IA Nekrasov, G. Keller, V. Eyert, N. Blümer, AK McMahan, RT Scalettar, T. Pruschke , VI Anisimov, and D. Vollhardt, Psi-k Newsletter No. 56 (April 2003), p. 65 ( Memento from October 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ G. Kotliar, SY Savrasov, K. Haule, VS Oudovenko, O. Parcollet, CA Marianetti, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 78, p. 865 (2006) doi: 10.1103 / RevModPhys.68.13
  6. ↑ The LDA + DMFT approach to strongly correlated materials ( Memento from October 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), Lecture Notes of the Autumn School 2011 Hands-on LDA + DMFT , editors: E. Pavarini, E. Koch, D. Vollhardt, A. Lichtenstein, Research Center Jülich (2011)
personal data
SURNAME Vollhardt, Dieter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and (since 1996) professor in Augsburg
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH bad Godesberg