Cyril Domb

Cyril Domb ( born December 9, 1920 in London, † February 15, 2012 in Jerusalem, Israel ) was an English theoretical physicist who worked on the physics of phase transitions and statistical mechanics.

Dombs parents were from Galicia, who emigrated to London Jews. He studied from 1938 with a fellowship at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, among other things, he heard Paul Dirac. In 1941 he graduated and worked in the military radar research, where he soon however with Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, Hermann Bondi formed his own group theory. After the war he returned to Cambridge, this time with a research grant. After completing his PhD at Fred Hoyle 1949 he was at the University of Oxford in Stanley Rushbrooke ( 1915-1995 ). 1952 to 1954 he was a lecturer at Cambridge. 1954 to 1981 he was professor of theoretical physics at King's College London. From 1981 he was a professor at Bar- Ilan University in Israel, where he retired in 1989. Domb was also president of the Jerusalem College of Technology and president of the Society of Orthodox Jewish scientists. He lived in Israel.

Domb began after the war in Cambridge interested in statistical mechanics, and developed independently of the formalism of transfer matrices, then had to discover, however, that it already Hendrik Anthony Kramers and Gregory Hugh Wannier (1911-1983) had previously come there. At that time were also known the works of Lars Onsager for the exact solution of the two dimensional Ising model, and began Domb for his dissertation in 1949 to apply the transfer matrix method to other models of statistical mechanics and developed approximations in the form of series solutions. He received from his series expansions for the Ising model with and without a magnetic field is also evidence for the absence of a singularity, rigorously proved by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung- Dao Lee in 1952, he found in various models identical critical exponents, a reference to the universality (Physics), then what in the 1960s was at the center of research in phase transitions.

Domb was for many years the important book series "Phase transitions and critical phenomena " by Academic Press out (the first 6 volumes from 1971 to 1976 with Melville S. Green, Volume 6 to 16 from 1983 to 1994 with Joel Lebowitz ).

At the suggestion of the Lubavitcher rabbi, he published several works on the compatibility of science with Orthodox Judaism, among other things, he was a book with Aryeh Carmell out ( "Challenge Torah view on science and its problems" ).

In 1981 he was awarded the Max Born Prize of the German Physical Society (DPG) and the British Institute of Physics.

His doctoral included Michael E. Fisher and Renfrey Potts ( from Potts model).

Writings

• The Critical Point: A Historical Introduction to the Modern Theory of Critical Phenomena. Taylor and Francis, London 1996