On 8th April, Prof. Dieter Vollhardt was awarded with an honorary doctorate of the University of Warsaw. The ceremony was held in the Senate Hall. The researcher is an outstanding physicist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Augsburg.

The academic work of Prof. Dieter Vollhardt has contributed significantly to the development of a few areas of physics, such as superconductivity and superfluidity, disordered systems, and most importantly the theory of electronic correlations – his main research interest. The greatest achievement of the researcher was formulating the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) – the best approximate theory describing electrons interacting in crystals. This method turned out to be a breakthrough enabling research of various phenomena caused by electronic correlations.

Academic achievements

Prof. Dieter Vollhardt graduated from the University of Hamburg. In 1970s, he did a research fellowship at the University of Southern California and was awarded with a doctoral degree at his Alma Mater. In 1984, the researcher defended his habilitation thesis at the Technical University of Munich. From 1987 to 1996, he worked as a professor at the RWTH Aachen University and between 1996 and 2018 at the Institute of Physics, as well as at the Centre for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism, University of Augsburg.

The scientist is a co-author of 218 scientific papers published in such prestigious journals as Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Communication or Physical Review Letters. Together with Prof. Peter Wölfle, he is the author of the book The superfluid phases of Helium 3, cited around two thousand times. Overall, Prof. Vollhardt’s papers have been cited almost twenty one thousand times. The h-index is 67 (according to Google Scholar).

Outside of his academic work, Prof. Vollhardt is an active member of research networks founded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG). He served as a spokesman of two networks: Research Center Cooperative Phenomena in Solids: Metal-Insulator Transitions and Ordering of Microscopic Degrees of Freedom between 2000 and 2009, and Research Unit Dynamical Mean-Field Approach with Predictive Power for Strongly Correlated Materials. For his academic achievements he received many prizes and distinguishments, including the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society in 2006, Max Planck Medal in 2010, and Freenberg Memorial Medal in 2022.

Long cooperation with UW researchers

The cooperation of the scientist with the University of Warsaw is linked primarily with the person of Prof. Krzysztof Byczuk from the UW’s Faculty of Physics. In 2000, the UW researcher carried out a research fellowship at the University of Augsburg, where he was involved in the projects of Prof. Vollhardt’s group. The two worked together with other scientists on the ferromagnetic theory, which concerns the analysis of photoemission spectra in correlated electron systems, the derivation of the Curie-Weiss law in dynamical mean-field theory, and the ferromagnetism and metal-insulator transitions in correlated electron systems with alloy disorder. From 2005 to 2008, Prof. Byczuk did another internship with the team of Prof. Vollhardt. The other scientists working with Prof. Byczuk were also invited to collaborate with the German researcher: Dr. Anna Kauch, Dr. Jaromir Panas, Dr. Banhi Chatterjee, and Dr. Jan Skolimowski. This resulted in numerous publications and scientific articles.

Prof Vollhardt’s group was also an international partner of the project “Predictive multi-scale simulations for correlated particles inside complex enviroments”, led by Prof Byczuk. Between 2011 and 2015, the project was funded with the TEAM grant given by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP). Prof. Bollhardt also supported a FNP’s international PhD project conducted at the University of Warsaw.

The distinguished physicist visited the University on many occasions, delivering lectures and teaching.