Thomas Maurice Rice

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T. Maurice Rice
TMR-Photo.jpg
Born(1939-01-26)26 January 1939
Dundalk, Ireland
Died18 July 2024(2024-07-18) (aged 85)
Küsnacht, Switzerland
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical Condensed Matter Physics
Institutions

Thomas Maurice Rice (January 26, 1939 - July 18, 2024), known professionally as Maurice Rice, was an Irish (and naturalised American) theoretical physicist specializing in condensed matter physics.

Contents

Life

Thomas Maurice Rice was born on 26 January 1939 in Dundalk, Ireland. He is the younger brother of structural engineer Peter Rice. He grew up in 52 Castle Road, Dundalk in County Louth with his two siblings. Like his brother, he studied at the local Christian Brothers school, Coláiste Rís. Subsequently he studied physics as an undergraduate at University College Dublin and as a graduate student with Volker Heine at the University of Cambridge. In 1964, he moved to the US and spent two years as a post-doc with Walter Kohn at the University of California, San Diego. Then he joined the technical staff at Bell Labs in 1966, where he stayed until 1981, when he joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland.

Rice and his wife, Helen, moved with their family of a son and two daughters from New Jersey to Zürich. Rice retired from teaching in 2004 and is an Emeritus Professor at ETH. [1] [2]

Career

Rice graduated at a time when the field of condensed matter physics expanded from the study of just simple metals and semiconductors to cover a broad range of compound materials. This led him to collaborate with both theorists and experimentalists to analyse the electronic properties of new materials. He joined Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s, studying metal-insulator transitions in transition metal oxides, electron-hole liquids in optically pumped semiconductors, and charge and spin density waves.

In the early 1980s, Rice moved to ETH Zurich, a few years before Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller at the nearby IBM laboratories made their discovery of high temperature superconductivity in layered cuprate compounds. [3] Rice switched his research to the challenges posed by these novel superconductors. Cuprates became a major topic in condensed matter physics, as a range of properties in addition to high temperature superconductivity were discovered. Rice and collaborators concentrated on developing a consistent microscopic interpretation of the growing experimental results. [4] One challenge was the microscopic description of the mysterious pseudogap phase, which appears in a range of intermediate hole doping; his research group focused on the role of enhanced Umklapp scattering in a nearly half-filled band as key to the unexpected features. [5]

Brinkman-Rice transition

In 1970, Rice and William F. Brinkman helped to characterize the transition from metal to insulator in semiconductors, adding to the Mott-Hubbard approximation. They published a paper addressing the problem of 'the excitation of two electrons to the outside of the Fermi sea', in which they modeled approaching the transition from the uncorrelated metallic state, where each orbital is half-filled. [6]

Awards and honours

Selected papers

The following papers are Rice's most cited:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BCS theory</span> Microscopic theory of superconductivity

In physics, theBardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory is the first microscopic theory of superconductivity since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes's 1911 discovery. The theory describes superconductivity as a microscopic effect caused by a condensation of Cooper pairs. The theory is also used in nuclear physics to describe the pairing interaction between nucleons in an atomic nucleus.

Unconventional superconductors are materials that display superconductivity which is not explained by the usual BCS theory or its extension, the Eliashberg theory. The pairing in unconventional superconductors may originate from some other mechanism than the electron–phonon interaction. Alternatively, a superconductor is called unconventional if the superconducting order parameter transforms according to a non-trivial irreducible representation of the point group or space group of the system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-temperature superconductivity</span> Superconductive behavior at temperatures much higher than absolute zero

High-temperature superconductors are defined as materials with critical temperature above 77 K, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. They are only "high-temperature" relative to previously known superconductors, which function at even colder temperatures, close to absolute zero. The "high temperatures" are still far below ambient, and therefore require cooling. The first breakthrough of high-temperature superconductor was discovered in 1986 by IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. Although the critical temperature is around 35.1 K, this new type of superconductor was readily modified by Ching-Wu Chu to make the first high-temperature superconductor with critical temperature 93 K. Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". Most high-Tc materials are type-II superconductors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fermi liquid theory</span> Theoretical model in physics

Fermi liquid theory is a theoretical model of interacting fermions that describes the normal state of the conduction electrons in most metals at sufficiently low temperatures. The theory describes the behavior of many-body systems of particles in which the interactions between particles may be strong. The phenomenological theory of Fermi liquids was introduced by the Soviet physicist Lev Davidovich Landau in 1956, and later developed by Alexei Abrikosov and Isaak Khalatnikov using diagrammatic perturbation theory. The theory explains why some of the properties of an interacting fermion system are very similar to those of the ideal Fermi gas, and why other properties differ.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of superconductivity</span>

Superconductivity is the phenomenon of certain materials exhibiting zero electrical resistance and the expulsion of magnetic fields below a characteristic temperature. The history of superconductivity began with Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes's discovery of superconductivity in mercury in 1911. Since then, many other superconducting materials have been discovered and the theory of superconductivity has been developed. These subjects remain active areas of study in the field of condensed matter physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mott insulator</span> Materials classically predicted to be conductors, that are actually insulators

Mott insulators are a class of materials that are expected to conduct electricity according to conventional band theories, but turn out to be insulators. These insulators fail to be correctly described by band theories of solids due to their strong electron–electron interactions, which are not considered in conventional band theory. A Mott transition is a transition from a metal to an insulator, driven by the strong interactions between electrons. One of the simplest models that can capture Mott transition is the Hubbard model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spin density wave</span>

Spin-density wave (SDW) and charge-density wave (CDW) are names for two similar low-energy ordered states of solids. Both these states occur at low temperature in anisotropic, low-dimensional materials or in metals that have high densities of states at the Fermi level . Other low-temperature ground states that occur in such materials are superconductivity, ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. The transition to the ordered states is driven by the condensation energy which is approximately where is the magnitude of the energy gap opened by the transition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pseudogap</span> State at which a Fermi surface has a partial energy gap in condensed matter physics

In condensed matter physics, a pseudogap describes a state where the Fermi surface of a material possesses a partial energy gap, for example, a band structure state where the Fermi surface is gapped only at certain points.

In solid-state physics, an energy gap or band gap is an energy range in a solid where no electron states exist, i.e. an energy range where the density of states vanishes.

A charge density wave (CDW) is an ordered quantum fluid of electrons in a linear chain compound or layered crystal. The electrons within a CDW form a standing wave pattern and sometimes collectively carry an electric current. The electrons in such a CDW, like those in a superconductor, can flow through a linear chain compound en masse, in a highly correlated fashion. Unlike a superconductor, however, the electric CDW current often flows in a jerky fashion, much like water dripping from a faucet due to its electrostatic properties. In a CDW, the combined effects of pinning and electrostatic interactions likely play critical roles in the CDW current's jerky behavior, as discussed in sections 4 & 5 below.

In materials science, heavy fermion materials are a specific type of intermetallic compound, containing elements with 4f or 5f electrons in unfilled electron bands. Electrons are one type of fermion, and when they are found in such materials, they are sometimes referred to as heavy electrons. Heavy fermion materials have a low-temperature specific heat whose linear term is up to 1000 times larger than the value expected from the free electron model. The properties of the heavy fermion compounds often derive from the partly filled f-orbitals of rare-earth or actinide ions, which behave like localized magnetic moments.

Cuprate superconductors are a family of high-temperature superconducting materials made of layers of copper oxides (CuO2) alternating with layers of other metal oxides, which act as charge reservoirs. At ambient pressure, cuprate superconductors are the highest temperature superconductors known. However, the mechanism by which superconductivity occurs is still not understood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iron-based superconductor</span>

Iron-based superconductors (FeSC) are iron-containing chemical compounds whose superconducting properties were discovered in 2006. In 2008, led by recently discovered iron pnictide compounds, they were in the first stages of experimentation and implementation..

A Peierls transition or Peierls distortion is a distortion of the periodic lattice of a one-dimensional crystal. Atomic positions oscillate, so that the perfect order of the 1-D crystal is broken.

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Distrontium ruthenate</span> Chemical compound

Distrontium ruthenate, also known as strontium ruthenate, is an oxide of strontium and ruthenium with the chemical formula Sr2RuO4. It was the first reported perovskite superconductor that did not contain copper. Strontium ruthenate is structurally very similar to the high-temperature cuprate superconductors, and in particular, is almost identical to the lanthanum doped superconductor (La, Sr)2CuO4. However, the transition temperature for the superconducting phase transition is 0.93 K (about 1.5 K for the best sample), which is much lower than the corresponding value for cuprates.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fulleride</span> Chemical compound

Fullerides are chemical compounds containing fullerene anions. Common fullerides are derivatives of the most common fullerenes, i.e. C60 and C70. The scope of the area is large because multiple charges are possible, i.e., [C60]n (n = 1, 2...6), and all fullerenes can be converted to fullerides. The suffix "-ide" implies their negatively charged nature.

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carlo Di Castro</span> Italian theoretical physicist

Carlo Di Castro is an Italian theoretical physicist in the field of statistical mechanics, superconductivity, and condensed matter physics. He is a patriarch of Italian theoretical condensed matter physics, founder of the “Rome Group”, member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and emeritus professor of Sapienza University of Rome. In 1969, Di Castro, in co-authorship with Giovanni Jona-Lasinio, introduced the revolutionary renormalization group approach into the study of critical phenomena, providing a first example of complexity in physical systems.

References

  1. Emeritus Professors Department of Physics ETH Zurich
  2. Prof. T.M. Rice D PHYS ETH Zurich
  3. Switzerland, Address ETH Zürich Dep of Physics Prof em Dr Thomas Maurice Rice Institut für Theoretische Physik HIT K. 43 1 Wolfgang-Pauli-Str 27 8093 Zürich. "Prof. em. Dr. Thomas Maurice Rice". phys.ethz.ch. Retrieved 27 August 2023.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. "Thomas Rice". royalsociety.org. Retrieved 27 August 2023.
  5. Rice, T. M. (1 October 2000). "Breakdown of Landau–Fermi Liquid in Two Dimensions Due to Umklapp Scattering". Journal of Superconductivity. 13 (5): 771. doi:10.1023/A:1007830702334. ISSN   1572-9605. S2CID   117431343.
  6. Brinkman, W. F.; Rice, T. M. (15 November 1970). "Application of Gutzwiller's Variational Method to the Metal-Insulator Transition". Physical Review B. 2 (10): 4302–4304. Bibcode:1970PhRvB...2.4302B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.2.4302.
  7. NUI - Honorary Degrees Awarded
  8. Members of Royal Irish Academy
  9. "T. Maurice Rice". National Academy of Sciences Member Directory. Retrieved 5 October 2023.
  10. Fellows of the Royal Society UK
  11. "EPS Europhysics Prize" . Retrieved 13 January 2022. For original contributions to the theory of strongly correlated electron systems.
  12. "John Bardeen Prize". M2S 2022 Conference. Retrieved 5 October 2023. for the physical insight he brought to the understanding of the superconducting state in strongly correlated materials in general, and for the prediction of unconventional pairing in Sr2RuO4 in particular.