Dietrich Belitz

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Dietrich Belitz
Born1955 (age 6869)
Germany
OccupationTheoretical physicist
TitleProfessor
Academic background
EducationBaccalaureate diploma, 1980
Dr. rer. nat., 1982
Alma mater Technical University of Munich
Thesis Der Einfluß inkohärenter Tunnelprozesse auf die Leitfähigkeit ungeordneter Materialien
Doctoral advisorWolfgang Götze

Dietrich Belitz (born 1955) is an American theoretical physicist on the faculty of the University of Oregon. He studies statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics.

Contents

Early life and education

Belitz earned his Diploma in 1980 and his Dr. rer. nat. degree in 1982, both from the Technical University of Munich (Germany). His dissertation was titled, Der Einfluß inkohärenter Tunnelprozesse auf die Leitfähigkeit ungeordneter Materialien (trans.: The influence of incoherent tunneling processes on the conductivity of disordered materials), advised by Wolfgang Götze. [1] [2] He did postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland, College Park. [3] [4]

Career

In 1987 Belitz joined the faculty at the University of Oregon and is a member of the Materials Science Institute there. [3] Belitz became a professor of physics in 1997. [5] His research has included statistical mechanics, condensed matter, and theory of quantum many-body systems." [6]

Reviews of Modern Physics describes Belitz' interests as, "... focused on quantum many-body problems, including superconductivity, magnetism, transport processes, and quantum phase transitions." [3]

Belitz is a member of the University's Condensed Matter Theory & Statistical Mechanics group, [5] which describes their work as the study of:

... strongly fluctuating systems with a large number (e.g., the Avogadro number!) of degrees of freedom. These include quantum many-body problems, "soft" phases of matter, and biological systems. The quantum phenomena we study include superconductivity and magnetism; quantum phase transitions, in particular metal-insulator and magnetic transitions; and transport theory. The soft systems include liquid crystals; complex fluids; slender flexible structures (e.g. polymer chains, a sheet of paper, or a ping-pong ball); macromolecular liquids and mixtures, and their phase separation through coarse-graining and multiscale modeling; and mechanical metamaterials. The biological systems include flocks, evolving populations, epidemics, trees, proteins, nucleic acids, and protein/nucleic acid complexes. [7]

Belitz served as department head of physics from 1998–2004, associate dean for natural sciences from 2004–2010, and as director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon from 2013–2019. [5]

From 2005 to 2020, Belitz served as associate editor for condensed matter theory for Reviews of Modern Physics. [3]

Selected publications

Awards, honors

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phase transition</span> Physical process of transition between basic states of matter

In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas, and in rare cases, plasma. A phase of a thermodynamic system and the states of matter have uniform physical properties. During a phase transition of a given medium, certain properties of the medium change as a result of the change of external conditions, such as temperature or pressure. This can be a discontinuous change; for example, a liquid may become gas upon heating to its boiling point, resulting in an abrupt change in volume. The identification of the external conditions at which a transformation occurs defines the phase transition point.

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a physical phenomenon in which the Hall conductance of 2-dimensional (2D) electrons shows precisely quantized plateaus at fractional values of , where e is the electron charge and h is the Planck constant. It is a property of a collective state in which electrons bind magnetic flux lines to make new quasiparticles, and excitations have a fractional elementary charge and possibly also fractional statistics. The 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Robert Laughlin, Horst Störmer, and Daniel Tsui "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" The microscopic origin of the FQHE is a major research topic in condensed matter physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dephasing</span> Mechanism recovering classical behavior from a quantum system

In physics, dephasing is a mechanism that recovers classical behaviour from a quantum system. It refers to the ways in which coherence caused by perturbation decays over time, and the system returns to the state before perturbation. It is an important effect in molecular and atomic spectroscopy, and in the condensed matter physics of mesoscopic devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Topological order</span> Type of order at absolute zero

In physics, topological order is a kind of order in the zero-temperature phase of matter. Macroscopically, topological order is defined and described by robust ground state degeneracy and quantized non-Abelian geometric phases of degenerate ground states. Microscopically, topological orders correspond to patterns of long-range quantum entanglement. States with different topological orders cannot change into each other without a phase transition.

In theoretical physics, statistical field theory (SFT) is a theoretical framework that describes phase transitions. It does not denote a single theory but encompasses many models, including for magnetism, superconductivity, superfluidity, topological phase transition, wetting as well as non-equilibrium phase transitions. A SFT is any model in statistical mechanics where the degrees of freedom comprise a field or fields. In other words, the microstates of the system are expressed through field configurations. It is closely related to quantum field theory, which describes the quantum mechanics of fields, and shares with it many techniques, such as the path integral formulation and renormalization. If the system involves polymers, it is also known as polymer field theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">String-net liquid</span> Condensed matter physics model involving only closed loops

In condensed matter physics, a string-net is an extended object whose collective behavior has been proposed as a physical mechanism for topological order by Michael A. Levin and Xiao-Gang Wen. A particular string-net model may involve only closed loops; or networks of oriented, labeled strings obeying branching rules given by some gauge group; or still more general networks.

<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-.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piers Coleman</span> British-American physicist

Piers Coleman is a British-born theoretical physicist, working in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics. Coleman is professor of physics at Rutgers University in New Jersey and at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Periodic instantons are finite energy solutions of Euclidean-time field equations which communicate between two turning points in the barrier of a potential and are therefore also known as bounces. Vacuum instantons, normally simply called instantons, are the corresponding zero energy configurations in the limit of infinite Euclidean time. For completeness we add that ``sphalerons´´ are the field configurations at the very top of a potential barrier. Vacuum instantons carry a winding number, the other configurations do not. Periodic instantons were discovered with the explicit solution of Euclidean-time field equations for double-well potentials and the cosine potential with non-vanishing energy and are explicitly expressible in terms of Jacobian elliptic functions. Periodic instantons describe the oscillations between two endpoints of a potential barrier between two potential wells. The frequency of these oscillations or the tunneling between the two wells is related to the bifurcation or level splitting of the energies of states or wave functions related to the wells on either side of the barrier, i.e. . One can also interpret this energy change as the energy contribution to the well energy on either side originating from the integral describing the overlap of the wave functions on either side in the domain of the barrier.

David Sherrington is a British theoretical physicist and Wykeham Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Oxford. He is known for his work in condensed matter and statistical physics, and particularly for the invention of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, an exactly solvable mean-field model of a spin glass.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amnon Aharony</span> Physicist at Ben Gurion University in Israel

Amnon Aharony is an Israeli Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and in the Physics Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. After years of research on statistical physics, his current research focuses on condensed matter theory, especially in mesoscopic physics and spintronics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of several other academies. He also received several prizes, including the Rothschild Prize in Physical Sciences, and the Gunnar Randers Research Prize, awarded every other year by the King of Norway.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Golubov</span> Russian physicist

Alexander Avraamovitch Golubov is a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, associate professor at the University of Twente (Netherlands). He specializes in condensed matter physics with the focus on theory of electronic transport in superconducting devices. He made key contributions to theory of Josephson effect in novel superconducting materials and hybrid structures, and to theory of multiband superconductivity.

David Alan Huse is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in statistical physics and condensed matter physics.

Tin-Lun "Jason" Ho is a Chinese-American theoretical physicist, specializing in condensed matter theory, quantum gases, and Bose-Einstein condensates. He is known for the Mermin-Ho relation.

Christopher John Pethick is a British theoretical physicist, specializing in many-body theory, ultra-cold atomic gases, and the physics of neutron stars and stellar collapse.

Alan Harold Luther is an American physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics.

Elbio Rubén Dagotto is an Argentinian-American theoretical physicist and academic. He is a distinguished professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Distinguished Scientist in the Materials Science and Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Germán Sierra</span> Spanish theoretical physicist, author, and academic

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References

  1. "INSPIRE". inspirehep.net. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  2. "Physics Tree - Dietrich Belitz". academictree.org. Retrieved April 17, 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Meet Our New RMP Colloquia Editor". Reviews of Modern Physics. January 4, 2021. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  4. "Dietrich Belitz | Institute for Fundamental Science". ifs.uoregon.edu. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 Belitz, Dietrich (2020). "Curriculum vitae" (PDF). University of Oregon. Retrieved April 1, 2022.
  6. "CAS News, Introducing Dietrich Belitz" (PDF). scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/. October 2004. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  7. Jane Gary. "Condensed Matter Theory & Statistical Mechanics | Institute for Fundamental Science". ifs.uoregon.edu. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
  8. "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. Retrieved April 2, 2022.