James Charles Phillips

James Charles Phillips named Jim Phillips, ( born March 9, 1933, New Orleans, Louisiana ) is an American theoretical solid state physicist.

Life

Phillips grew up in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico and graduated from high school graduation in 1950 in Albuquerque. He studied at the University of Chicago physics (including with Enrico Fermi in its last price 1955) and mathematics with a bachelor 's degree in 1953 and his doctorate in 1956 at Morrel H. Cohen. As a post - graduate student, he was until 1958 at Bell Laboratories (in theory group of Conyers Herring ), 1958/59 at the University of California, Berkeley (with Charles Kittel ), and 1959/60 at the University of Cambridge at the Cavendish Laboratory ( as well as 1962/63 and 1966/67, each on a scholarship from the National Science Foundation). From 1960, he was first an assistant professor and finally professor of physics at the University of Chicago. In 1969 he went back to Bell Laboratories, where he remained until 2001. After that, he was at Rutgers University as a visiting scientist.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1977. In 1972 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize and in 1992 the Hume Rothery Medal.

Work

Phillips developed in the late 1950s, the pseudopotential method, an important method of theoretical solid state physics, for example, in case a precise band structure calculations. He developed this theory at the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. Marvin Cohen further and applied it to the accurate prediction of optical properties and photoemission data of semiconductors. He gave the method also to theorists in Cambridge such as Volker Heine on.

In the 1960s he focused on the microscopic theory of the tunnel junction of superconducting to normal metal (with Morrel Cohen and Leo Falicov ), the observations of Giaever confirmed and crowned with the Nobel Prize work of Brian Josephson with stimulated, and a theory of ionicity of chemical bonds in crystals, especially semiconductors.

In the 1970s he developed the theory of compact networks with topological constraints with application to disordered systems such as glass. From the 1980s, he turned his theory of self-organized networks of the then newly discovered high-temperature superconductors (HTS). His theory of ceramic HTS reserves the phonon interaction in as the primary mechanism for the formation of Cooper pairs, but gives the translational invariance as in the classical case of metallic superconductors. Instead, the image of local molecular wave packets that propagate network - like manner between the dopants results ( percolation ).

He was concerned in the 1990s and continues with glass and other disordered systems and developed a theory of the observed bifurcation - two values ​​to 3/5 and 3/7 - the exponent in the described by a stretched exponential relaxation behavior microscopically homogeneous disordered systems ( stretched exponential relaxation, SER ). He suggested to use this exponent as a measure of local homogeneity of the underlying systems and applied it to, among other things, the distribution of citations of scientific publications (and their sudden change in 1960). His network theory of glasses also led to the development of new glasses in the industry ( Corning) and prediction and explanation of new glass phases.

In the 2000s he turned initiated by Per Bak Self-organized criticality (SOC ) on biological systems, for example in protein design, the study of their functionality, structure, folding, and of their biological evolution He used SOC to one in Brazil protein databases developed scale of hydrophobicity of proteins to support. His theory also led to applications for viruses that can be used in the target cancer cells ( from strains of Newcastle disease virus ).

Writings

He wrote over 500 journal articles

• Covalent bonding in crystals, molecules, and polymers. University of Chicago Press, 1969.
• Bonds and Bands in Semiconductors. Academic Press 1973, reprint with G. Lucovsky, New York, Momentum 2009.
• Marvin Cohen, Volker Heine: The Quantum Mechanics of Materials. In: Scientific American. 246, No. 6, 1982, p 82-102, doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0682-82.

• JR Chelikowsky Electronic Structure and Optical Properties of Semiconductors, Springer, 1988.