Dieter Vollhardt

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

Life

Dieter Vollhardt studied physics from 1971 to 1976 at the University of Hamburg. This was followed by a three-year sabbatical with Professor Kazumi Maki at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles ( USA) on a scholarship from the Study Foundation of the German people. During this time he worked on the theory of critical currents in superfluid helium-3, which was the subject of his thesis (1977) and his doctorate (1979 ) at the University of Hamburg. From 1979 to 1984 he worked as a research assistant of Professor 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 was responsible for several research visits to research institutions in the U.S., including 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 of Theoretical Physics C, and the post of Director at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Rheinisch -Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen. In 1996, he then took a position at the new, furnished by the State of Bavaria Chair of Theoretical Physics III (Electronic Correlations and Magnetism ) at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences University of Augsburg.

In 2006, Dieter Vollhardt awarded for the development and application of the dynamical mean -field theory with the Agilent Technologies EUR Physics Prize 2006, the European Physical Society (along with Antoine Georges, Gabriel Kotliar and Walter Metzner ).

On March 17, 2010 Dieter Vollhardt, the Max Planck Medal, the highest award of the German Physical Society for achievements in theoretical physics awarded. The physicist received the award " in recognition of his significant contributions to derive a new mean-field theory of correlated quantum systems and understanding of Vielteilchenproblemen in the quantum theory of condensed matter". In 2011 he received the Ernst Mach Medal of Honor.

Since March 2011, Vollhardt is a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Work

Vollhardt addressed since his thesis and dissertation in the 1970s with superfluid helium 3 and its complex phase structure and in the 1980s, among other things, the theory of Anderson localization.

He is one of the founders of the dynamical mean -field theory ( Dynamical Mean - Field Theory, DMFT ) for strongly correlated electronic systems in solid state physics, such as the transition metals (eg, iron or vanadium) and their oxides, ie materials with electrons in open d -and f- shells. These systems are characterized by the Coulomb repulsion of the electrons ( strong correlation of electrons) which has the tendency to localize electron in competition with the shaft aspect of the electrons, which leads to a number of material-specific phenomena which it is desired to better understand (such as Mott insulator transitions ). The usual band theory or the density functional theory proved there to be insufficient, and also the much studied modeling via the Hubbard model often did not prove flexible enough. 1989 led Vollhardt and his graduate student Walter Metzner one the limiting case of an electronic model with local interaction ( Hubbard model ) on a lattice with infinite number of neighbors, which was further developed by Gabriel Kotliar, and Antoine Georges to Dynamical Mean - Field Theory. It can be regarded as self-consistent field-theoretical extension of an impurity model by Philip W. Anderson, with a mean field, which describes the coupling to an " electron bath ". Linking the DMFT with conventional methods to calculate the electronic band structure, such as the Local Density Approximation (LDA ) of density functional theory, allows the calculation of the microscopic properties of materials with strongly correlated electrons.

Writings

  • Dynamical mean-field theory for correlated electrons ( Einstein Lecture ), Ann. Phys. (Berlin), 524, 1 (2012 ) doi: 10.1002/andp.201100250
  • Gabriel Kotliar, Strongly correlated materials: Insights from dynamical mean field theory, Physics Today, March 2004
  • With Peter Wölfle, Superfluid Phases of Helium 3, Taylor and Francis, 1990, corrected reprint from Dover Publications 2013
  • Superfluid Helium 3: The superfluid, Part 1-3, Physical leaves, Vol 39 (1983 ), p.41 doi: 10.1002/phbl.19830390205, 120 doi: 10.1002/phbl.19830390504, 151 doi: 10.1002/phbl.19830390605
  • Normal 3He: An Almost Localized Fermi - Liquid, Rev. Mod Phys. 56, 99 (1984 ) doi: 10.1103/RevModPhys.56.99
  • Strong -coupling approaches to correlated fermions, in: Enrico Fermi Course 121, Broglia, Schrieffer (Editor), North Holland 1994
  • Electronic Correlations and Magnetism - an introduction pdf
  • With Peter Wölfle, A Diagrammic, self-consistent treatment of the Anderson localization problem in d ≤ 2 Dimensions, Phys. Rev. B 22, 4666 (1980 ) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.22.4666
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