Nikolay Prokof'ev

Last updated
Nikolay Prokof'ev
Born
Alma mater Moscow Engineering Physics Institute
Known for Diagrammatic Monte Carlo
AwardsFellow of the American Physical Society
Scientific career
Fields Physics, Condensed Matter Theory
Institutions University of Massachusetts Amherst
Academic advisors Yuri Kagan

Nikolay Victorovich Prokof'ev is a Russian-American physicist known for his works on supersolidity and strongly correlated systems and pioneering numerical approaches.

Contents

Biography

He received his MSc in physics in 1982 from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, Moscow, Russia. In 1987, he received his PhD in theoretical physics from Kurchatov Institute (Moscow), under the supervision of Yuri Kagan, where he worked from 1984 to 1999. In 1999, he became a professor at the physics department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [1]

Research

He is recognised for his research on strongly correlated states in electronic and bosonic systems, critical phenomena, and quantum Monte Carlo methods. [2]

His and his coauthors have made key contributions to the theory of supersolids, including the theory of superfluidity of crystalline defects, such as the emergence of superfluidity at grain boundaries and in dislocation cores, [3] [4] and the theory of the superglass state. [5] Together with Boris Svistunov and Igor Tupitsyn, he co-invented the widely used Monte Carlo worm algorithm. With Svistunov, he also developed the diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, [6] a technique for the stochastic summation of Feynman diagrams that is free from the numerical sign problem. [7]

He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society,  for "pioneering contributions to theories of dissipative quantum dynamics and for innovative Monte Carlo approaches to quantum and classical studies of critical phenomena." [8]

He coauthored the book on modern theory of superfluidity. [9]

References

  1. "Nikolai Prokof'ev | Physics Department | UMass Amherst". Physics Department at UMass Amherst. Retrieved 2018-09-30.
  2. "Nikolay Prokofiev - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
  3. Prokof’ev, Nikolay; Svistunov, Boris (2005-04-20). "Supersolid State of Matter". Physical Review Letters. 94 (15): 155302. arXiv: cond-mat/0409472 . Bibcode:2005PhRvL..94o5302P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.155302. PMID   15904155. S2CID   45498667.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  4. "Superfluid States of Matter". CRC Press. 2015-04-15. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
  5. Boninsegni, Massimo; Prokof’ev, Nikolay; Svistunov, Boris (2006-03-16). "Superglass Phase of $^{4}\mathrm{He}$". Physical Review Letters. 96 (10): 105301. arXiv: cond-mat/0512103 . doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.105301. PMID   16605751. S2CID   118886810.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  6. "slides" (PDF).
  7. Rossi, R.; Prokof'ev, N.; Svistunov, B.; Van Houcke, K.; Werner, F. (2017-04-01). "Polynomial complexity despite the fermionic sign". EPL (Europhysics Letters). 118 (1): 10004. arXiv: 1703.10141 . Bibcode:2017EL....11810004R. doi:10.1209/0295-5075/118/10004. ISSN   0295-5075. S2CID   17929942.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  8. "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
  9. "Superfluid States in Nature and the Laboratory", Superfluid States of Matter, CRC Press, 2015-04-15, pp. 523–544, doi:10.1201/b18346-21, ISBN   9781439802755