Alex Zunger
Citation: "For his seminal contributions to the theoretical understanding
and prediction of “spontaneous ordering,” phase-stability, and electronic
properties of semiconductor alloys; for the impact that this work has
had on experimental studies of electronic materials, and for his continued
leadership in the field."
Biography: Alex Zunger is an Institute Research Fellow and
leader of the Solid State Theory at the U.S. Department of Energy’s
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He received his B.Sc, M.Sc,
and Ph.D education at the Tel Aviv University in Israel and did his
post-doctoral training at Northwestern University (1975-1977) and (as
IBM Fellow) University of California, Berkeley (1977-1978). He joined
the newly founded NREL in 1978 where he established the Solid State
Theory group and has since trained and collaborated with 35 post-doctoral
fellows.
Dr. Zunger is an author of 400 journal publications, including over
85 in Physical Review Letters and Rapid Communication. According to
recent research done by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI),
he is the 39th most cited physicist out of more than 500,000 physicists
examined, based on publications in 1981-1997 in all branches of physics
(his work was cited 8,000 times). His work centers on development and
application of first-principles electronic structure theory of real
materials. It includes the development of first-principles Pseudopotentials;
accurate exchange-correlation functionals; the momentum-space total
energy formalism; simultaneous relaxation of atomic positions and electronic
wave functions; order N electronic structure approaches; and cluster
expansions for alloy thermodynamics. He applied these techniques to
metal alloys, quantum semiconductor nanostructures, points defects,
and surfaces.
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