Lars Hedin

Lars Tore Hedin (February 4, 1930 – 2002) was a Swedish physicist working on condensed matter physics and emeritus professor of Lund University. He is known for the development of GW approximation based on the Hedin equations, named after him.

Life Lars Tore Hedin was born in Örebro, Sweden in 1930, son of engineers.

He studied undergraduate physics in KTH Royal Institute of Technology, obtaining a master's degree in 1955. which later became known as the GW approximation, where G is the many-body Green's function and W the screened interaction term. The equations that he developed are called the Hedin equations. The GW approximation became a competitor theory for density functional theory, also developed about the same time. The same year, Hedin became professor at Linköping University, but the year afterward he accepted a professorship at Lund University where he stablished his own group. In 1994, he accepted the four year position of director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. He returned to Lund University as emeritus.

Hedin used his GW method to study photoemission. He called this theory the 'blue electron theory', which he explained as

Hedin also worked in X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS), introducing the local density approximation for the GW self energy.

Hedin was editor of Solid State Communications from 1971 to 1990.

Personal life He married his wife Hillevi in 1953. They had three daughters.