Valery Pokrovsky

Valeri Leonidovich Pokrovsky (Russian Валери Леонидович Покровский, Valery L. Pokrovsky English transcription; born 1931 ) is a Russian physicist. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Texas A & M University and a scientist at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Valery Pokrovsky studied physics in Kharkov (Ukraine ), where he received his diploma in 1953, and received his doctorate in 1957 at the University of Tomsk. His teachers were Lifschitz and Achijeser. He then spent 13 years teaching at a technical school in Novosibirsk, where he was also in 1957 received his doctorate in Rumer ( at the University of Tomsk ). From 1957 he worked at the Institute of Radiation Physics and thereafter the Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He also lectured at the University of Novosibirsk. Since 1966 he has been researching on the then newly founded Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka near Moscow, connected to a professorship in theoretical physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Since 1992 he is a professor at Texas A & M University (1998, he was appointed distinguished professor ).

The focus of his scientific work lie in the statistical physics and in solid state physics. Particularly noteworthy are his early fundamental contributions, circa 1965, to the modern theory of phase transitions (scaling of the correlation functions near critical points ), along with Alexander Pataschinski, as well as his analysis of phase transitions between commensurate and incommensurate phases in two-dimensional systems, together with Andrei Talapov ( Pokrovsky Talapov - transition). More recently (2005) he deals with the influence of noise on Landau-Zener tunneling and materials with simultaneously ferromagnetic and superconducting properties.

With Patashinski and Isaac Chalatnikow 1963, he developed a non- perturbative method for semi-classical scattering problems in quantum wells in the quantum mechanics (using Regge poles ).

Pokrovsky's excellent research is inter alia with the Landau Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1984 ), the Humboldt Prize from the German Research Foundation ( 2000) and Lars- Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society ( 2005) were appreciated.