IAS Visiting Member Prof Marvin Cohen from University of California at Berkeley gives an introduction to the background of the development of the conceptual basis for condensed matter physics.
Free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.
The speaker will begin with an introduction to the background of the development of the conceptual basis for the field. For example, one view of solids is to regard them as a collection of interacting atoms. A second view is an "emergency approach." A system is probed, elementary excitations are produced, and then the condensed matter system is described in terms of a response function. The speaker will go on to discuss the total Hamiltonian for a solid, and will describe approximations such as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation and the Hartree approximation to reduce the problem to a soluble level. Periodicity, symmetries, Bloch's theorem, and the like bring the problem to a state where one can solve for electronic energy bands and wavefunctions.
Depending on time constraints, the speaker will discuss various aspects of electronic structure.
About the Speaker
Marvin Cohen is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His current and past research covers a broad spectrum of subjects in theoretical condensed matter physics. He is a recipient of the US National Medal of Science, the APS Oliver E. Buckley Prize for Solid State Physics, the APS Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize, the Foresight Institute Richard P. Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, and the Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum along with numerous other honors and a Doctorat Honoris Causa, University of Montreal.
Prof Cohen has contributed more than 750 technical publications. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2005, he was President of the American Physical Society (APS), an organization representing more than 47,000 physicists in universities, industry and national laboratories.
Free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come first-served basis.
