Cristiane de Morais Smith

Last updated
Cristiane de Morais Smith Lehner
Education University of Campinas (BSc physics 1985), (MSc, 1989), (PhD, 1994)
Scientific career
Fields Strongly-correlated systems, condensed matter
Institutions University of Utrecht
Doctoral advisor Prof. Amir Caldeira, Prof. Gianni Blatter

Cristiane de Morais Smith Lehner is a Brazilian theoretical physicist and professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, where she leads a research group studying condensed matter physics, cold atoms and strongly-correlated systems. In 2019, the European Physical Society awarded Morais Smith its Emmy Noether Distinction. [1]

Contents

Morais Smith has authored or co-authored over 100 academic papers, including articles in Nature Communications , Physical Review , and Physical Review B , where several of her papers have been recognized as "Editors Choice" and "Scientific Highlights". [2] As of March 2020, her work has received over 2900 citations. [3]

In addition, Morais Smith is an editor for the European Journal of Physics B , which focuses on condensed matter and complex systems. [4]

Education

Morais Smith obtained a physics BSc from University of Campinas in 1985, continuing to complete a MSc with highest honors in 1989 entitled The Effect of the Initial Preparation to Describe the Dynamics of a Quantum Brownian Particle, under her adviser Amir Caldeira. She continued with Caldeira to complete a PhD in 1994, also at University of Campinas entitled Quantum and Classical Creep of Vortices Intrinsically Pinned in High-Temperature Superconductors. Much of the work for her PhD was completed at ETH Zurich where she worked with Gianni Blatter.

Career

Starting in March 1986, Morais Smith was a French language teacher at Brazilian Telecommunications Company (TELEBRAS), in Campinas Brazil, until, in December 1988 Morais Smith briefly became the owner of and teacher at a French language school. [2]

From 1989 to 1994, during her PhD, Morais Smith accepted a permanent lecturer position in the Department of Physics at the State University of São Paulo (UNESP), in Bauru, Brazil. [2] During this time, she was also a visiting scientist in the Condensed Matter group at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, as well as a guest PhD student at ETH Zurich. [2]

Following the award of her PhD, she accepted a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, also at ETH Zurich. [2] In 1995, she moved to the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Hamburg, Germany as a research assistant. [5] After finishing a post-doc in Hamburg, Morais Smith began working at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where the Swiss National Science Foundation awarded her the Professor Boursier Fellowship. At the University of Fribourg, she advanced to an associate professor position. [6]

In 2004, Morais Smith was hired by the Utrecht University as a full professor with a chair in condensed matter theory. [6] She is chair of the Condensed Matter Physics department there. [7]

Morais Smith is one of three directors of the Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics (a collaboration between University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, and Utrecht University), where she represents Utrecht University. [8] [2]

Other

Morais Smith grew up in Paraguaçu Paulista, a village 500 km from Sao Paulo Brazil. She was thirteen years old when she decided to become a physicist. [9]

Morais Smith is fluent in Portuguese (her native language), English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. [2]

In September 2002, Morais Smith married Stefan Lehner, a Swiss designer. [2]

Morais Smith was featured in a Dutch newspaper article in 2018 for her work on chiral superconductors where the pairing function has a chirality e.g. . In layered chiral superconductors there is a geometric Meissner effect, [10] which is a variation on the Meissner effect.

Honors and awards

In 2001, Morais Smith was awarded a "Professeur Boursier du Fond National Suisse" or Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship for a project entitled Spontaneous formation of charge patterns in two-dimensional strongly interacting electron systems. [11] [12] This prize is awarded to only 2 or 3 researchers per year, and holds a monetary award of more than one million Swiss Francs. [2]

Morais Smith received a People’s Republic of China 'High-End Foreign Expert' Professorship in 2014 and 2015 at the Wilczek Quantum Center, awarded by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs. [2]

In 2016, the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) awarded its Dresselhaus Prize to Morais Smith for "her outstanding contribution to the understanding of topological phases in two-dimensional atomic and electronic systems". [13] [14]

In 2019, the European Physical Society awarded Morais Smith its EPS Emmy Noether Distinction "for her outstanding contributions to the theory of condensed matter systems and ultracold atoms to unveil novel quantum states of matter." [1] The EPS Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics, established in 2013, is awarded "to enhance the recognition of noteworthy women physicists with a strong connection to Europe through nationality or work," particularly those who are "role models that will help to attract women to a career in physics." [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Condensed matter physics</span> Branch of physics

Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter, especially the solid and liquid phases, that arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms and electrons. More generally, the subject deals with condensed phases of matter: systems of many constituents with strong interactions among them. More exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at extremely low cryogenic temperatures, the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms, the Bose–Einstein condensates found in ultracold atomic systems, and liquid crystals. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by experiments to measure various material properties, and by applying the physical laws of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, and other physics theories to develop mathematical models and predict the properties of extremely large groups of atoms.

Amir Ordacgi Caldeira is a Brazilian physicist. He received his bachelor's degree in 1973 from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, his M.Sc. degree in 1976 from the same university, and his Ph.D. in 1980 from University of Sussex. His Ph.D. advisor was the Physics Nobel Prize winner Anthony James Leggett. He joined the faculty at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in 1980. In 1984 he did post-doctoral work at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at University of California, Santa Barbara and at the Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory at IBM. In 1994–1995 he spent a sabbatical at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a full professor at Universidade Estadual de Campinas. He was the recipient of the Wataghin Prize, from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, for his contributions to theoretical physics in 1986.

Nai-Chang Yeh is a Taiwanese-American physicist specializing in experimental condensed matter physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subir Sachdev</span> Indian physicist

Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018, and was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 2023. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 2017–2019, and is Editor-in-Chief of Reports on Progress in Physics 2022-.

Steven Mark Girvin is an American physicist who is Sterling Professor and former Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. He is noted for his theoretical work on quantum many body systems such as the fractional quantum Hall effect, and as co-developer of circuit quantum electrodynamics, the application of the ideas of quantum optics to superconducting microwave circuits. Circuit QED is now the leading architecture for construction of quantum computers based on superconducting qubits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shoucheng Zhang</span> Chinese-American physicist (1963–2018)

Shoucheng Zhang was a Chinese-American physicist who was the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He was a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, the quantum Hall effect, the quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics, and high-temperature superconductivity. According to the National Academy of Sciences:

He discovered a new state of matter called topological insulator in which electrons can conduct along the edge without dissipation, enabling a new generation of electronic devices with much lower power consumption. For this ground breaking work he received numerous international awards, including the Buckley Prize, the Dirac Medal and Prize, the Europhysics Prize, the Physics Frontiers Prize and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.

The EPS CMD Europhysics Prize is awarded since 1975 by the Condensed Matter Division of the European Physical Society, in recognition of recent work by one or more individuals, for scientific excellence in the area of condensed matter physics. It is one of Europe's most prestigious prizes in the field of condensed matter physics. Several laureates of the EPS CMD Europhysics Prize also received a Nobel Prize in Physics or Chemistry.

Ashvin Vishwanath is an Indian-American theoretical physicist known for important contributions to condensed matter physics. He is a professor of physics at Harvard University.

The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) is a research facility established in the context of the Universities Excellence Initiative by the German Federal and State Governments. The multidisciplinary and interinstitutional cluster is located at Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, and has been initiated on 1 November 2012. The funding with more than €25 million by the German Research Foundation will run until 31. December 2018. Scientific teams cooperating in the cluster come from the Universität Hamburg, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), the European XFEL GmbH (XFEL), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and the newly founded Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD). A full application for a second research period of seven years was handed in at the end of 2017 to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for discussion. After the successful application in 2018, the new cluster “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” started in 2019.

Matthew P. A. Fisher is an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics. He completed his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1981 and earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986 with Anthony Leggett as his advisor, with part of his work done under the supervision of Eduardo Fradkin. He went on to become first a visiting scientist and then a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (1986–1993). He joined the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the physics department of the University of California in 1993. In 2007 he joined Microsoft's Station Q as a research physicist, on leave from the UCSB physics department. During the academic year 2009–2010 he was on the faculty at Caltech, returning to the physics department at UCSB in summer 2010.

Eduardo Hector Fradkin is an Argentinian theoretical physicist known for working in various areas of condensed matter physics, primarily using quantum field theoretical approaches. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he is the director of the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, and is the author of the books Quantum Field Theory: An Integrated Approach and Field Theories of Condensed Matter Physics.

Catherine Meusburger is an Austrian mathematician and physicist. She works at the interface between mathematical physics, algebra and geometry. Since 2011 she has served as professor of mathematics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Tamar Seideman is the Dow Chemical Company Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Northwestern University. She specialises in coherence spectroscopies and coherent control in isolated molecules and dissipative media as well as in ultrafast nanoplasmonics, current-driven phenomena in nanoelectronics and mathematical models.

Françoise Remacle is a Belgian theoretical physical chemist whose research topics have included fast time scales in chemistry, the chemical interactions of quantum dots, and DNA computing. She is a director of research for the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, and head of the Theoretical Physical Chemistry group at the University of Liège.

Eun-Ah Kim is a Korean-American condensed matter physicist interested in high-temperature superconductivity, topological order, strange metals, and the use of neural network based machine learning to recognize patterns in these systems. She is a professor of physics at Cornell University.

Catherine Kallin is a Canadian theoretical quantum condensed matter physicist whose research topics have included spin wave theory, the quantum Hall effect, frustrated antiferromagnets, chirality in superconductors, and high-temperature superconductivity. She is a professor emerita of physics and astronomy at McMaster University.

William P. Halperin is a Canadian-American physicist, academic, and researcher. He is the Orrington Lunt Professor of Physics at Northwestern University.

Erica W. Carlson is an American physicist specializing in superconductors, liquid crystals, and strongly correlated materials. She is 150th Anniversary Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University. As well as for her research, she is known for her work in physics education for quantum physics, and for her introduction of innovative technologies including podcasts and wikis into her physics teaching.

Sarah Shandera is a physicist and an associate professor at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research currently focuses on using quantum systems, quantum information, and out-of-equilibrium systems as tools to study open questions in gravity and cosmology. She serves as a member of the Executive Team of the next generation ground-based Cosmic microwave background experiment,CMB S-4 collaboration.

Natalia Borisovna Perkins is a Russian and American physicist whose research involves quantum phases of condensed matter, such as quantum spin liquids, both through observation and theoretical analysis. She is a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota.

References

  1. 1 2 Bergé, Luc (16 December 2019). "EPS Emmy Noether distinction award for Cristiane Morais Smith". EPS. Retrieved 1 January 2020. Cristiane Morais Smith leads a research group in Strongly Correlated Systems at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Utrecht University, working on low-dimensional systems, ranging from condensed matter to cold atoms. Her group pioneered the development of a thermodynamic description of topological insulators and superconductors, as well as the use of a projected quantum electrodynamics formulation to investigate topological phases driven by interactions. In the last years, her group has been playing an important role in the development of electronic quantum simulators and metamaterials in collaboration with experimentalists in Utrecht.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). uu.nl.
  3. ↑ "C. M. Smith". Google Scholar. Retrieved 10 March 2020.
  4. ↑ "Editorial Board". European Journal of Physics. Retrieved 19 April 2019.
  5. ↑ "Former Members". uni-hamburg.de. Archived from the original on 2019-04-19. Retrieved 2019-04-19.
  6. 1 2 "Mildred Dresselhaus Award and Recipients" (PDF). University of Hamburg. 2019. Retrieved January 1, 2020. After holding a C1 postdoc position in Hamburg, Germany, she was awarded the Professor Boursier Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and became associate professor in Fribourg, Switzerland. Finally, in 2004 she was offered a Chair in Condensed Matter Theory and became a full professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. In 2008, she was awarded the prestigious VICI fellowship from the Dutch Research Organization (NWO), which has strongly boosted her research.
  7. ↑ UU staff page for "Prof. dr. C. (Cristiane) de Morais Smith"
  8. ↑ "Executive Board". Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics. 31 October 2017. Retrieved 19 April 2019.
  9. ↑ Dessibourg, Olivier (2004). "Christiane de Morais Smith Lehner: Theoretische Physik im Stile Picassos" (PDF). Horizonte. Retrieved January 3, 2020. Paraguaçu Paulista, ein Dorf, 500 Kilometer von São Paulo entfernt. Christiane de Morais Smith Lehner ist 13 Jahre alt, als der Lehrer seine Klasse vor eine – seiner Ansicht nach – unlösbare Aufgabe stellt. «Doch ich habe die Lösung gefunden», erzählt sie, noch immer voller Stolz. (Paraguaçu Paulista, a village 500 kilometers from São Paulo. Christiane de Morais Smith Lehner is 13 years old when the teacher presents his class with what he believes is an unsolvable task. "But I found the solution," she says, still full of pride.)
  10. ↑ Kvorning, T.; Hansson, T. H.; Quelle, A.; Smith, C. Morais (2018-05-25). "Proposed Spontaneous Generation of Magnetic Fields by Curved Layers of a Chiral Superconductor". Physical Review Letters. 120 (21): 217002. arXiv: 1709.00482 . Bibcode:2018PhRvL.120u7002K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.217002. PMID   29883131. S2CID   47004151.
  11. ↑ "SNSF Professorships" (PDF). Swiss National Science Foundation. Retrieved 20 April 2019.
  12. ↑ "ViCoM Young Researchers Meeting 2016 Invited Speakers". Vienna Computational Materials Laboratory. Retrieved 19 April 2019.
  13. ↑ "Mildred Dresselhaus award for Cristiane Morais Smith". Delta Institute for Theoretical Physics.
  14. ↑ "A Jewel of Equal Opportunities | CUI – The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging". www.cui-archiv.uni-hamburg.de. Retrieved 2020-01-02. Prof. Andreas Hemmerich called Morais Smith a perfect role model and his favorite proof against gravity. In his honorary speech, he outlined her path of life starting in a small village in Brazil to her engagement as a highly acclaimed physics professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
  15. ↑ "EPS Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics - European Physical Society (EPS)". www.eps.org. Retrieved 2020-01-02.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.