Theoretical Physics III
Vollhardt's group
Kampf's group
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Scientific Curriculum Vitae
During 1971-1976 Dieter Vollhardt studied physics at the University of
Hamburg. From 1976 to 1979 he worked with Professor Kazumi Maki at the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles on the theory of
critical currents in superfluid Helium 3 - the topic of his Diploma
Thesis (1977) and his Doctoral Thesis (1979) at the University of
Hamburg. From 1979 to 1984 Dieter Vollhardt was Research Associate of
Professor Peter Wölfle - and from 1984 to 1987 a Heisenberg-Fellow of
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - at the Max-Planck-Institute for
Physics and Astrophysics (Heisenberg-Institute) in Munich. During this
time he also stayed at various research institutions in the US, among
them, in 1983, the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara,
and the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill. In 1984 he completed his
Habilitation at the Technical University of Munich. In 1987 Dieter
Vollhardt took over the Chair for Theoretical Physics C, and was
appointed Director at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, at the
RWTH Aachen (Aachen Institute of Technology). In 1996 he accepted the
offer for a new Chair for Theoretical Physics on Electronic
Correlations and Magnetism at the Institute for Physics of the
University of Augsburg. (Curriculum
Vitae)
Dieter Vollhardt's areas of research are the theory of
electronic correlations and magnetism, e.g., the realistic
modelling of strongly correlated materials
(see Physics Today, March 2004), disordered
electronic systems, and normal and superfluid Helium3. He is author (together with P. Wölfle, Karlsruhe) of the book The Superfluid Phases of Helium3 (Taylor & Francis, 1990).
As the German representative in Commission C5 (Low
Temperatures) of the
International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) during 1999 - 2005 he contributed
to the book "Physics Now"
of the IUPAP published in 2004 which contains reviews of the state of the art in physics.
In 2006 he was awarded the
Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize 2006
of the European Physical
Society for the "Development and Application of the Dynamical
Mean-Field Theory" (together with A. Georges, G. Kotliar and
W. Metzner).
On March 17, 2010, he will receive the Max Planck
medal for 2010 of the
German
Physical Society "in recognition of his significant contributions
to the derivation of a new mean-field theory of correlated quantum
systems and to the understanding of many-body problems in the quantum
theory of condensed matter".
Areas of Current Research
Realistic modelling of strongly correlated electronic systems
We develop and apply the novel computational scheme LDA+DMFT to
investigate electronically correlated materials from first principles.
LDA+DMFT is based on a combination of conventional methods for computing
electronic band structures, e.g., the local density approximation (LDA),
with the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) for correlated electron
systems. The LDA+DMFT approach is employed in particular to calculate
photoemission and absorption spectra of transition metal oxides in close
collaboration with experimental groups.
Metal-insulator transitions in electronic systems
Phase transitions between metallic, non-metallic, magnetically ordered
and non-ordered states in correlated and/or disordered electronic
systems are investigated within dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) plus
finite temperature quantum Monte-Carlo techniques (QMC), as well as by
the numerical renormalization group and other techniques. Thereby the
influence of disorder, frustration and doping on the transitions is studied.
Microscopic theory of magnetism
We investigate the microscopic conditions for the stability of
long-range ordered magnetic states in strongly correlated insulators and
metals. A broad range of theoretical tools (rigorous methods,
perturbation theory at weak and strong coupling, low and high
dimensions, variational procedures, quantum
Monte-Carlo calculations, numerical renormalization group, etc.) is
employed for this purpose.
Correlated electrons in nonequilibrium
The real-time dynamics of correlated electrons are studied using
dynamical mean-field-theory for nonequilibrium. This approach can be
used in particular to describe pump-probe experiments, in which the sample is
excited by a first laser pulse and analyzed with a second laser pulse
after a controlled time delay.
Correlated bosonic systems
The properties of correlated lattice bosons are investigated by means of
the newly developed bosonic dynamical mean-field theory (B-DMFT). In
this approach the dynamic coupling between normal and condensed bosons
is explicitly included.
Development of new theoretical methods
We develop analytical and numerical approaches for the non-perturbative
investigation of electronic correlation phenomena in quantum mechanical
lattice models.
Introductory literature
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Elektronische Korrelationen und Magnetismus: Eine Einführung (in German)
(html,
pdf)
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Strongly Correlated Materials: Insights from Dynamical Mean-Field Theory,
G. Kotliar and D. Vollhardt, Physics Today (March 2004).
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Lecture Notes:
Investigations of correlated electron systems using the limit of high dimensions
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Strong-coupling approaches to correlated fermions
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see also:
Research topics / Selected publications
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Complete publication list (PDF file,
99kb)
URL: http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/theo3/index.vollha.en.shtml
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