Physics Professor James Freericks Wins National Book Award
October 23, 2009
In early October, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Alpha Sigma Nu, the honor society of Jesuit colleges and universities, awarded a 2009 National Book Award in the category of the sciences to Georgetown Physics professor James Freericks for his book Transport in Multilayered Nanostructures: The Dynamical Mean-Field Theory Approach. Freericks feels especially honored by this award, he explained, because it is rare for a book geared for science experts to be awarded a book prize.
"My ultimate goal is for this work to help enable other researchers to enter this fascinating field and to become practitioners on their own," he said. "I hope the recognition and honor associated with this award will help increase the audience of the book and make this goal become a reality. Finally, there is a special honor in being the first Georgetown faculty to be awarded this prize in the field of natural science."
Freericks describes his research as describing the methodology for determining the properties of electrons that interact strongly with each other in a device composed of materials stacked on each other, "as layers on a sandwich."
"Everyone knows electrons are negatively charged and they repel each other," Freericks explains. "What most people don't know is that in most materials, scientists who are calculating the properties of these materials can ignore this fact and still find very accurate results for about 90% of the known materials. This is because the quantum mechanical effects make the electrons act like they don't see any of the other electrons because of the so-called Pauli exclusion principle. My work focuses on the remaining 10% or so of materials, where electrons interact so strongly with each other that their movement through a solid is a complicated, intertwined dance, somewhat like a 'conga line'."
Freericks describes how these materials behave when layered with what he calls common or "garden variety" metals like copper, silver, gold, platinum, lead, and magnesium, which differ from "strongly correlated metals" like the rare-earth magnets that are used in all headphones. Freericks notes that electrons move differently through those common metals than through "strongly correlated" metals, which provides the basis for his research.
Applications for this technology are many. "[They] fall into the realm of tunnel diodes, which can be used as transistors in computer chips, to superconducting Josephson junctions, which could be the next generation of ultrafast computers (100 GHz or faster processor speeds), to green technologies such as solid-state cooling or power generation from so-called thermoelectric effects."
Freericks is currently teaching an undergraduate class "Physics 211: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics" and is a member of the University Committee on Rank and Tenure. He has an A.B. from Princeton, took both his Master’s and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, and is a visiting scholar at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He has been teaching at Georgetown since 1994.
