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 which arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms. More generally, the subject deals with "condensed" phases of matter: systems of very many constituents with strong interactions between them. More exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at low temperature, the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms, and the Bose–Einstein condensate found in ultracold atomic systems. 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 theories to develop mathematical models.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is an American multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) under a contract with the DOE. Established in 1942, ORNL is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system and third largest by annual budget. ORNL is located in the Roane County section of the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. ORNL's scientific programs focus on materials, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security.
Clifford Glenwood Shull was a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist.
Neutron scattering, the irregular dispersal of free neutrons by matter, can refer to either the naturally occurring physical process itself or to the man-made experimental techniques that use the natural process for investigating materials. The natural/physical phenomenon is of elemental importance in nuclear engineering and the nuclear sciences. Regarding the experimental technique, understanding and manipulating neutron scattering is fundamental to the applications used in crystallography, physics, physical chemistry, biophysics, and materials research.
The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is an accelerator-based neutron source facility in the U.S. that provides the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world for scientific research and industrial development. Each year, this facility hosts hundreds of researchers from universities, national laboratories, and industry, who conduct basic and applied research and technology development using neutrons. SNS is part of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is managed by UT-Battelle for the United States Department of Energy (DOE). SNS is a DOE Office of Science user facility, and it is open to scientists and researchers from all over the world.
Alvin Martin Weinberg was an American nuclear physicist who was the administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) during and after the Manhattan Project. He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006. He was the first to use the term "Faustian bargain" to describe nuclear energy.
Alexander Leonidovich Kuzemsky is a Russian theoretical physicist.
David Pines was the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) and the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (I2CAM), distinguished professor of physics, University of California, Davis, research professor of physics and professor emeritus of physics and electrical and computer engineering in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), and a staff member in the office of the Materials, Physics, and Applications Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Jeremy Christopher Smith is a British-born computational molecular biophysicist.
Amit Goyal is the Director of the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary RENEW Institute at SUNY-Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. He is also SUNY Distinguished Professor and a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at SUNY-Buffalo. Goyal was previously a UT-Battelle Corporate Fellow, a Battelle Distinguished Inventor and an ORNL Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee. He was also the Chair of the UT-Battelle-ORNL Corporate Fellow Council.
Sow-Hsin Chen, is a Hoklo Taiwanese physicist and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a recognized pioneer in the research of the dynamic properties of supercooled and interfacial water with the use of neutron scattering techniques. As an educator, he has been recognized for his training of young scientists in the use of those same techniques. Regarding hydrogen storage, his research focuses on the use of activated carbon to allow hydrogen to be stored at room temperature.
John M. "Jack" Carpenter was an American nuclear engineer known as the originator of the technique for utilizing accelerator-induced intense pulses of neutrons for research and developing the first spallation slow neutron source based on a proton synchrotron, the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS). He died on 10 March 2020.
Ernest Omar Wollan was an American physicist who made major contributions in the fields of neutron scattering and health physics.
David Joseph Singh is a theoretical physicist who is a curators' professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He was previously a corporate fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
John Joseph Quinn was an American theoretical physicist as well as an academic administrator; he was a former Chancellor and a member of the faculty at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA. He was considered to be an expert in the areas of solid-state physics and many-body theory including two dimensional Composite fermions, low-dimensional systems, quantum Hall effect and nanoscience. Quinn was also one of the first researchers to recognize that physics of ‘two-dimensional electronic systems’ needs to be treated as a professional-sub-specialty.
Sergei V. Kalinin is a corporate fellow at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also a Joint Associate Professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
Thomas "Thom" Mason is a Canadian-American condensed-matter physicist who currently serves as the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Prior to this appointment, he had been an executive at Battelle Memorial Institute from 2017–2018, and the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2007–2017. Mason came to Oak Ridge in 1998 at the start of construction of the Spallation Neutron Source which he led from 2001 until project completion in 2006.
Clarice Evone Phelps (née Salone) is an American nuclear chemist researching the processing of radioactive transuranic elements at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She was part of ORNL's team that collaborated with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research to discover tennessine. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, recognizes her as the first African-American woman to be involved with the discovery of a chemical element. Phelps was formerly in the US Navy Nuclear Power Program. At ORNL, Phelps manages programs in the Department of Energy's Isotope & Fuel Cycle Technology Division investigating industrial uses of nickel-63 and selenium-75.
Vincent Meunier is a Belgian/American condensed matter and materials physicist known for his theoretical and computational research on electronic, optoelectronic, and structural properties of low-dimensional materials. Among his contributions are the quantum mechanical description of processes responsible for scanning tunneling image formation in low-dimensional materials, the development of a microscopic theory of nanocapacitors, and contributions to the theory of electronic transport and ultra-low frequency vibrational modes in van der Waals heterostructures. He is the Head and Professor in the Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, USA where he holds the Gayl and Jeffrey Kodosky Constellation Chair in Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), of the Institute of Physics (IOP), and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Athena Safa Sefat, born 1977 in Iran is a Canadian/American physicist, with research focus on quantum materials and correlated phenomena. She was a senior scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and led the DOE Basic Energy Science on "Probing Competing Chemical, Electronic, and Spin Correlations for Quantum Materials Functionality". She is currently a Program Manager at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, with Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering.
