Arkady Aronov

Biography Aronov was born in 1939 in Leningrad, currently Saint Petersburg, and in 1962 graduated from the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute. He got his PhD degree from the Institute of Semiconductors of Russian Academy of Sciences in 1966 under supervision of Grigory Pikus. The title of his thesis was "Magnetic phenomena in crossed electric and magnetic fields". In January 1991, he moved back to the Ioffe Institute to head the theoretical physics division, and, still holding this position, in May 1994 he joined the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In the 1990s, he visited University of Karlsruhe for extended periods of time, and he also became an Associate Member of the scientific staff of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. which is currently known as the Bir–Aronov–Pikus mechanism and is considered to be one of three most important spin relaxation mechanisms, on par with the Dyakonov–Perel and Elliott–Yafet mechanisms.

Mesoscopic physics Together with Boris Altshuler, a graduate student under his supervision, Aronov developed theory of electron-electron interaction in disordered conductors. In particular, he derived a Boltzmann-like equation which governs the kinetic behavior of electrons in conductors with weak disorder (weak localization regime), and discovered that electrical conductivity acquires a correction due to electron-electron interaction. This term is widely known as Altshuler–Aronov correction. In collaboration with Altshuler and Patrick A. Lee he applied this theory to explain the experimentally observed phenomenon of zero-bias anomaly - suppression of density of states by interactions at the Fermi surface.

In 1981, in collaboration with Boris Altshuler and David Khmelnitsky, he investigated decoherence of electrons in the weak localization regime due to electron-electron interaction, and discovered that two distinct time scales, decoherence (dephasing) time and relaxation time, exist in one and two dimensions. (In three dimensions, these time scales coincide).

In the same year, together with Boris Altshuler and Boris Spivak, Aronov suggested an experiment which by measuring an Aharonov–Bohm oscillations in a disordered conductor would reveal the weak localization effect by the existence of oscillations with the halved period as compared with Aharonov–Bohm oscillations in clean conductors. The experiment by Dmitry Sharvin and Yury Sharvin performed in the same year fully confirmed the predictions.

These advances were summarized by Altshuler and Aronov in a review article "Electron-Electron interaction in disordered conductors", which became a reference material in the field and by 2009 was cited over 1000 times. which eventually opened the whole research field of electrons in random magnetic field, useful for understanding the quantum Hall effect.

Honors Corresponding Member of Russian Academy of Sciences, 1990. Professorship of the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation, University of Karlsruhe. and another one in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he spent extensive periods of time, in 2009.