The International Advisory Committee of the series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories is pleased to announce the award of the tenth Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal in Many-body Physics jointly to Professors Raymond Bishop and Hermann Kümmel. The award will be presented at the 13th International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 5-9 December 2005 (http://qmbt13.df.uba.ar/).
The Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal was established in 1983 by the many-body physics community in memory of the unique and enduring contributions of Eugene Feenberg to many-body physics (http://www.qmbt.org/index.php3?doc=Feenberg ). Many-body physics is concerned with understanding the properties of matter in terms of the interactions between the microscopic (atomic and subatomic) constituents of matter. As such it applies to many broad subdisciplines of physics, chemistry, and materials science. Feenberg was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; a short biography may be found in the NAS archives at http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/efeenberg.html.
This Medal, first presented in 1985, is designated for work that is firmly established and that can be demonstrated to have significantly advanced the field of many-body physics. Past recipients have included David Pines (1985), John W. Clark (1987), Malvin H. Kalos (1989), Walter Kohn (1991, 1998 Nobel laureate), David M. Ceperley (1994), Lev P. Pitaevskii (1997), Anthony J. Leggett (1999, 2003 Nobel laureate), Philippe Nozières (2001), Spartak T. Belyaev and Lev P. Gor'kov (2004).
Professors Kümmel and Bishop will receive this Medal for their development and application of the Coupled-Cluster Method (CCM) to many important problems in physics. During the past half century, the application of this quantum many-body physics approach has contributed substantially to our understanding of challenging problems in condensed matter physics (including electrons in solids, quantum liquids and gasses, and quantum magnetism), atomic and molecular physics, nuclear physics, and subnuclear physics/quantum field theory (see R.F. Bishop and H.G. Kümmel, “The Coupled-Cluster Method,” Physics Today, March 1987). The Coupled-Cluster Method is one of very few ab initio methods which has an enduring impact in quantum chemistry.
Professor Kümmel, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, is cited for “his role in the creation and early development of the coupled-cluster method, and pioneering high-accuracy applications of it to problems in nuclear and subnuclear physics.”
Professor Bishop, Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester, UK is cited for his “development of the coupled-cluster method toward a comprehensive ab initio approach, and innovative applications across the full spectrum of subfields of quantum many-body physics.”
A brief biography of
Professor Kümmel:
Professor Hermann Kümmel was born in 1922 in Berlin. After obtaining his Diploma degree in 1950 from Humboldt University in East Berlin, he received the Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Free University in West Berlin, where he continued with his research until moving to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, USA as a research associate. It was during his two years in Ames that, in collaboration with Fritz Coester, the foundations were laid for CCM. In 1960, Professors Kümmel and Coester published their seminal ideas of CCM in the journal Nuclear Physics. After periods at the University of Tübingen, the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Chemistry in Mainz and the University of Mainz, and at Oklahoma State University as Professor of Physics, Professor Kümmel returned to Mainz as senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute, where he built a strong research group, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Mainz.
In 1969 Professor Kümmel moved with his entire research group to a Chair in Physics at the newly established Ruhr University in Bochum (RUB), Germany, where he established RUB as one of the world’s leading centers in quantum many-body theory. In particular, it was at this time that he turned his attention to the theoretical development and computational application of CCM to nuclear systems specifically and fermionic systems in general. The level of sophistication achieved in Bochum under his leadership, in both formal and computational strength, has rarely been matched.
He retired in 1988 at the mandatory retirement age, retaining his association with RUB as Professor Emeritus.
A
brief biography of Professor Bishop:
Professor Raymond Bishop was born in London in 1945. After earning the B.A. degree at the Queen’s College, Oxford University in 1966 and the Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at Stanford University in the U.S. in 1971, Professor Bishop returned to England as Science Research Council Research Fellow, and subsequently, Senior Research Associate, and Lecturer in the Department of Physics, Manchester University, and as Consultant to the Theory Group at the Science Research Council, Daresbury Laboratory.
Professor Bishop returned to the U.S. for several years at the University of California, Berkeley as Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Lecturer in the Department of Physics. He then returned to the UK, joining the faculty of the Department of Mathematics of UMIST in 1979. He was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1988 and Chairman of the Department of Mathematics in 1991. Theoretical Physics moved to the Department of Physics in 1995, where Professor Bishop became Head in 1996. He is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester (formed by the merger of UMIST with Manchester University in 2004).
Professor Bishop initiated his research program in CCM during lengthy visits to RUB in the mid to late 1970s. While at Bochum, he began a fruitful collaboration with Karl-Heinz Lührmann, in which they applied CCM theory exhaustively, and with great success, to the problem of the electron gas at both high and low densities, which is a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics. From that starting point, Professor Bishop has systematically and energetically developed coupled-cluster theory into the elegant, consistent, flexible, and accurate tool for microscopic calculation that we know today. At Manchester, he established one of the world’s leading research groups in quantum many-body physics. At the same time he has developed and leads an informal international school of many-body physics research through his extensive collaborations throughout the world. He continues to apply CCM to an enormously broad range of theoretical physics subdisciplines.
Selected significant publications by Professor Kümmel
F. Coester and H. Kümmel, Short-range correlations in nuclear wave functions, Nucl. Phys. 17, 477-485 (1960).
H. Kümmel, Theory of many-body wave functions with correlations, Nucl. Phys. A176, 205-218 (1971).
H. Kümmel and K. H. Lührmann, Equations for linked clusters and the energy variational principle, Nucl. Phys. A191, 525-534 (1972).
R. Offermann, W. Ey and H. Kümmel, Degenerate many fermion theory in exp(S)--form, Nucl. Phys. A273, 349 (1976)
H. Kümmel, K. H. Lührmann and J. G. Zabolitzky, Many fermion theory in the
exp S--(or coupled cluster) form, Phys. Rep. 36C, 1-63 (1978)
Selected significant publications by Professor Bishop:
R. F. Bishop and K. H. Lührmann, Electron correlations: I. Ground-state results in
the high-density regime, Phys. Rev. B 17, 3757-3780 (1978).
J. S. Arponen, R. F. Bishop, and E. Pajanne, Extended coupled-cluster method. II.
Excited states and generalized random-phase approximation, Phys. Rev. A 36, 2539-
2549 (1987).
R. F. Bishop, M. F. Flynn, M. C. Boscà, E. Buendia, and R. Guardiola, Translationally
invariant coupled-cluster theory for simple finite systems, Phys. Rev. C 42, 1341-1360
(1990).
R. F. Bishop, J. B. Parkinson, and Y. Xian, Coupled-cluster treatments of correlations
in quantum antiferromagnets, Phys. Rev. B 44, 9425-9443 (1991).
R. F. Bishop, An overview of coupled cluster theory and its applications in physics, Theor. Chem. Acta 80, 95-148 (1991)
For further information, contact:
Siu A. Chin
Chair, International Advisory Committee for
Professor of Physics
Department of Physics
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77840
U.S.A.
Phone: 979-845-4190
Fax: 979-845-2590
Professors Hermann Kümmel (left) and Raymond Bishop, September 2005