Hermann Kümmel

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Hermann Kümmel (born October 7, 1922 in Berlin ; † May 16, 2012 in Herne ) was a German physicist. He was a professor of theoretical physics at the Ruhr University in Bochum .

biography

Hermann Kümmel was the son of the art historian and later general director of the state museums in Berlin, Otto Kümmel and his wife Therese Kümmel geb. Klee and a grandson of the civil engineer Werner Kümmel .

From 1946 to 1950 he studied physics at the Humboldt University in (East) Berlin. He completed his studies with a diploma thesis in the field of experimental physics. He then moved to the Free University in (West) Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1952 with a thesis on quantum electrodynamics . In 1956 the habilitation followed with a thesis on the quantum mechanical justification of thermodynamics .

In 1956 he accepted an invitation to do a research stay at Iowa State University in Iowa City . In 1958 he returned to Germany. After a semester as a lecturer at the University of Würzburg , he accepted a research position at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz in 1958 and worked as a private lecturer at the University of Mainz . 1966/67 he was ("full") professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater , Oklahoma . In 1967 he followed a call as a scientific member and head of department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz.

In 1970 he followed a call to a full professorship for theoretical physics at the Ruhr University in Bochum . There he supervised a large number of undergraduate and graduate students. He retired in 1988 .

He has been to the USA ( Argonne National Laboratory and State University of New York at Stony Brook ) and Taiwan several times for longer research stays .

Kümmel was a member of the American Physical Society , the German Physical Society and the German University Association .

research

Kümmel's area of ​​expertise was theoretical physics with a focus on many-body problems . He published about 90 articles in professional journals and wrote the textbook Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (WBG, 1984).

In 1958, together with Fritz Coester (then Iowa State University) , he invented the “ coupled cluster ” method, which they initially used in nuclear physics. From 1966, it was further developed for use in quantum chemistry by Jiři Čížek (* 1938) and then by Josef Paldus (* 1935). It enables the most precise calculation of properties of light to medium-weight atoms and molecules and relatively precise statements about other many-particle systems (e.g. atomic nuclei). The method is therefore sometimes referred to as the “gold standard” in quantum chemistry. With the availability of computer support, Kümmel and his colleagues carried out the first extensive calculations ever with this method on atomic nuclei around 1975. It was not until after 2000 that such extremely complex calculations with meanwhile improved nuclear forces and much more powerful computers were resumed by several groups around the world and the method also proved to be promising for medium-weight cores.

Honors

  • In 1974, Kümmel became an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz.
  • In 2005 he received the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Award and Medal (simultaneously with Raymond Bishop , Manchester).
  • In 2007, the Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award named after Kümmel was established. It is intended to honor outstanding young scientists in the field of many-body physics and is awarded every two years at the Recent Progress in Many Body Theories conference . The first award winner was Frank Verstraete (2007).

Publications (selection)

  • Free electrons in unitary quantum electrodynamics. University thesis; Berlin, Free University, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, dissertation from June 25, 1952
  • with Fritz Coester: Short-range correlations in nuclear wave functions. In: Nucl. Phys. Volume 17, 1960, pp. 477-485.
  • Theory of many-body wave functions with correlations. In: Nucl. Phys. A Vol. 176, 1971, pp. 205-218.
  • with Karl Heinz Lührmann: Equations for linked clusters and the energy variational principle . In: Nucl. Phys. A. Volume 191, 1972, pp. 525-534.
  • with R. Offermann and W. Ey: Degenerate many fermion theory in exp (S) - form. In: Nucl. Phys. A. Volume 273, 1976, p. 349
  • with KH Lührmann and JG Zabolitzky: Many fermion theory in the exp S - (or coupled cluster) form. In: Physics Reports. Volume 36C, 1978, pp. 1-63
  • Introduction to quantum mechanics. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1984, ISBN 3-534-08753-4
  • with Raymond Bishop: The Coupled Cluster Method. In: Physics Today. March 1987
  • A biography of the coupled cluster method. In: R. Bishop, T. Brandes, KA Gernoth, NR Walet, Y. Xian (Eds.): Recent progress in many-body theories, Proceedings of the 11th international conference. World Scientific Publishing, 2002, pp. 334-348.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Cizek: On the correlation problem in atomic and molecular systems . In: J. Chem. Phys. tape 45 , 1966, pp. 4256 . An overview is provided by: Rodney Bartlett and Monika Musial: Coupled cluster theory in quantum chemistry . In: Reviews of Modern Physics . tape 79 , 2007, pp. 291-352 , doi : 10.1103 / RevModPhys.79.291 .
  2. ↑ for example: Werner, Hans-Joachim et al. : Efficient Explicitly Correlated Coupled-Cluster Approximations . In: Petr Cársky, Josef Paldus and Jirí Pittner (eds.): Recent Progress in Coupled Cluster Methods . 2010, ISBN 978-90-481-2885-3 , pp. 573-619 (English). , Rodney Bartlett: How and why coupled cluster theory became the preeminent method in ab initio quantum chemistry. In: C. Dykstra: Theory and applications of computational chemistry: the first 50 years. Elsevier, 2005, p. 1191. More precisely, this means the CC for single and double stimuli (CCSD).
  3. ↑ see Physics Report article by Kümmel, Lührmann, Zabolitzky 1978
  4. ↑ for example: Hagen, Papenbrock, Dean, Hjorth-Jensen: Medium mass nuclei from chiral nucleon nucleon interaction . In: Phys. Rev. Lett. tape 101 , 2008, p. 092502 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.101.092502 , arxiv : 0806.3478 . Dean et al. a .: Nuclear structure calculations with coupled cluster method from quantum chemistry . In: Nuclear Physics A . tape 752 , 2005, pp. 299-308 , doi : 10.1016 / j.nuclphysa.2005.02.041 , arxiv : nucl-th / 0409062 .
  5. ^ Caraway Early Achievement Award. indiana.edu, August 1, 2018, accessed October 7, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Caraway, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 7, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 2012
Place of death Herne