Yoram Alhassid

Yoram Alhassid is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist and the Frederick Phineas Rose Professor of Physics at Yale University. He is known for his contributions to nuclear many-body theory, mesoscopic physics, cold atom physics, and quantum chaos, with a focus on correlated quantum many-body systems in which finite-size effects play an important role.

Education and early career

Alhassid received his B.Sc. in physics and mathematics with special distinction from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1974, and his Ph.D. in physics from the same institution in 1979, working under the supervision of Raphael David Levine. His doctoral thesis, titled "On the Information Theoretic Approach to Nuclear Reactions," was awarded the Aharon Katzir Prize, given to one doctoral recipient for excellence in natural sciences in Israel. In 2017, he was appointed the Frederick Phineas Rose Professor of Physics.

An advance by Alhassid and collaborators was the development of methods to circumvent the sign problem in SMMC calculations for odd-particle-number nuclei, enabling systematic calculations of ground-state energies for isotopic chains of heavy odd-mass nuclei. The group has also developed methods to extract nuclear spectra from SMMC calculations using imaginary-time correlation matrices, and to study nuclear deformation, shape transitions, and collective excitations in heavy nuclei.

Mesoscopic physics and quantum dots

Alhassid and his collaborators developed a statistical theory of quantum dots that describes the mesoscopic fluctuations of conductance through quantum dots in terms of the underlying signatures of quantum chaos in the single-particle electronic wavefunctions. His comprehensive review article on this subject, published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 2000, drew on tools from semiclassical physics, random matrix theory, and the supersymmetric nonlinear sigma model to describe quantum transport through dots in which the electron dynamics are chaotic or diffusive.

The group also contributed to the theoretical understanding of ultra-small metallic nanoparticles in which conventional BCS theory of superconductivity breaks down, a regime common to both nanoparticles and nuclei despite their energy gaps differing by six orders of magnitude.

Awards and honors Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Physics (1984–1988) Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (2001) Fellow of the American Physical Society (2001) Frederick Phineas Rose Professor of Physics, Yale University (2017)

Selected publications