Tom Lubensky

Tom C. Lubensky ( born May 7, 1943 in Kansas City, Missouri) is an American theoretical solid state physicist.

Lubensky studied at Caltech with a bachelor 's degree in 1964 and from Harvard University with a master's degree in physics in 1965 and his doctorate in 1969. As a post-doctoral researcher, he was at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay and 1970/71 at Brown University. In 1971 he became assistant professor in 1980 and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. 1981/82 he was a visiting professor at the University of Paris VI, and from 1990 to 1995 he was an advisor to Exxon Research.

He conducted research on a wide variety of soft matter such as liquid crystals, quasicrystals and complex fluids, the properties of its phases including elastic and hydrodynamic theory, topological defect structure, ( broken ) symmetries and thermodynamic fluctuations which he studied with the renormalization group. Among other things, he said the twist grain boundary phase ( TGB ) in liquid crystals before when analogue of the vortex lattice in type 2 superconductors by Abrikosov, with helical defects (repeated twisting of the layer structure of the smectic phase) play the role of the magnetic flux tubes.

In 2004 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for significant contributions to the theoretical solid state physics, including the prediction and elucidation of the properties of new, partially ordered phases of complex materials. Lubensky is a Fellow of the American Physical Society ( 1985), the National Academy of Sciences ( 2002) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 2000). In 1975 he was Sloan Fellow and 1981/82 Guggenheim Fellow.

He has been married since 1968 and has a son and a daughter.

Writings

• With Paul Chaikin Principles of condensed matter physics, Cambridge University Press 1995