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RECENT PROGRESS IN MANY-BODY THEORIES (RPMBT)

The conference series on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories (RPMBT) is now firmly established as the premier series of international meetings in the field of many-body physics. The conferences offer an ideal opportunity to recognize important achievements and to showcase significant new results in various aspects of many-body physics. The series acts too to highlight entirely new and rapidly evolving fields which are themselves increasing both the breadth and depth of the discipline of quantum many-body theory, which underpins so much of modern physics.

The RPMBT series is governed and overseen by an International Advisory Committee. The general format and style of the conferences in the series follow an accepted and well-developed pattern, focusing on the development, refinement and important applications of the techniques of quantum many-body theory. The intention of the series has always been to cover in a broad and balanced fashion both the entire spectrum of theoretical tools developed to tackle the quantum many-body problem and their major fields of application. One of the main aims of the series is to foster the exchange of ideas and techniques among physicists working in such diverse areas of applications of many-body techniques as nuclear and subnuclear physics, astrophysics, atomic and molecular physics, quantum chemistry, complex systems, quantum field theory, strongly correlated electronic systems, magnetism, quantum fluids and condensed matter physics.

Next Meeting in the RPMBT Series

The 19th International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body-Theories will take place in June, 26-30, 2017 in Pohang, South Korea. The conference venue will be the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP).

The Website can be seen here. For further information please contact the Organizing Committee.

RPMBT-19 (Pohang, South Korea; 26-30 June, 2017)
The Local Organising Committee comprises:
Jong Han (Chair), Jung-Hoon Han (Co-Chair), Kiseok Kim, Eun-Gook Moon, Kicheon Kang.
Important Dates are:
Abstract submission deadline: 30 January 2017
Deadline for nominations for the Feenberg Memorial Medal Award: 17 February 2017
Deadline for nominations for the Kümmel Early Achievement Award: 17 February 2017
Early registration fee deadline: 1 May 2017
Welcome reception: 25 June 2017
Conference opening: 26 June 2017
Conference close: 30 June 2015
See here for a copy of the previous Conference Poster.


Announcement: Open Call for Nominations for the Feenberg Medal

We are pleased to invite you to nominate candidates for the Feenberg Memorial Medal.

Complete nominations - as indicated in the Rules below - should be submitted (by email only please)
and by the deadline of 17 February 2017 to:
Susana Hernández ( shernand@df.uba.ar ).

The decision of the Committee will be announced by 2 April 2017.

Please note that:

  • proposals received AFTER 17th February will not be evaluated for this year.

The current members of the Selection Committee for this Award are:

Susana Hernández; Buenos Aires, Argentina (Chair)
Christopher Pethick; Urbana-Champaign, USA
Eric Suraud; Toulouse, France

We warmly thank you in advance for your involvement. Your nomination enable our community to maintain the high standard set by previous recipients and ensure that the Feenberg Medal continues to play a significant role in recognizing outstanding accomplishments in many-body physics,
Susana Hernández
Chair, Feenberg Medal Selection Committee

Announcement: Open Call for Nominations for the Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award

We are pleased to invite you to nominate candidates for the Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award.

Complete nominations - as indicated in the Rules below - should be submitted (by email only please)
and by the deadline of 17 February 2017 to:
Heidi Reinholz ( heidi.reinholz@uni-rostock.de ).

The decision of the Committee will be announced by 2 April 2017.

Please note that:

  • proposals received AFTER 17th February will not be evaluated for this year and,
  • due to the nature of this award, nomination files will NOT be kept for future consideration, after this evaluation.
    Similarly, files submitted for the last award will not be considered for this round.

The current members of the Selection Committee for this Award are:

Heidi Reinholz; Rostock, Germany (Chair)
Joe Carlson; Los Alamos, USA
Leandra Vranješ Markić; Split, Croatia

We warmly thank you for your cooperation and enthusiasm to encourage young physicists into the field of Quantum Many-Body Theory,
Heidi Reinholz
Chair, Kümmel Award Selection Committee

Organisation of the RPMBT Conference Series and Allied Activities

The governing body that oversees all of the activities of the RPMBT Series of conferences and allied activities in the general field of quantum many-body theory is its International Advisory Committee (IAC). The IAC is responsible for selecting the range of Topics that is covered by the RPMBT series. One of the primary duties of the IAC is to select the venue and the Principal Organiser(s) of the next meeting in the Series, who will in turn act as Chair(s) of the Local Organising Committee for that Conference. The IAC is also responsible for arranging the eventual publication of any Conference Proceedings. The IAC has also arranged with World Scientific Publishing Co. to publish an ongoing Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory.

RPMBT International Advisory Committee

The current composition of the International Advisory Committee is:

Topics Covered by the RPMBT Series

The scientific program of all RPMBT conferences covers not only traditional topics in many-body physics but also other frontier areas of current interest. Traditionally, one or two areas of special interest to the Principal Local Organiser selected by the IAC, and the Local Organising Committee which he/she chairs, are also highlighted at each meeting.
Topics include:

  • Quantum Fluids, Superfluids, and Solids
  • Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics
  • Strongly Correlated Electronic Systems
  • Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena
  • Quantum Magnetism
  • Computational Quantum Many-Body Methods
  • Quantum Information and Computation
  • Complex Systems
  • Cold Bose and Fermi Systems
  • New Frontiers

Publication of the RPMBT Conference Proceedings

  • The Proceedings of the first conference in the series, RPMBT-1, were published as Issues 1 and 2 of Volume 328 of the journal Nuclear Physics A.
  • For the next two meetings, RPMBT-2 and RPMBT-3, the Proceedings were published as separate stand-alone volumes in the Springer series Lecture Notes in Physics.
  • No Proceedings were published for the fourth meeting, RPMBT-4.
  • For the next four meetings, RPMBT-5 to RPMBT-8 inclusive, the Proceedings were published by Plenum Press as separate volumes in a series entitled Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories.
  • After RPMBT-8 the International Advisory Committee (IAC) of the RPMBT Series agreed with World Scientific to create a new series of volumes entitled Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory (SAQMBT), which would include the Proceedings of future RPMBT Conferences as well as other stand-alone volumes. The Proceedings of the next six meetings, RPMBT-9 to RPMBT-14 inclusive, were published in this Series. The Proceedings of three of these meetings, RPMBT-11 to RPMBT-13 inclusive, were also co-published as separate issues of the journal International Journal of Modern Physics B.
  • No proceedings were published for the next two meetings, RPMBT-15 and RPMBT-16.
  • Beginning with RPMBT-17 the Proceedings will be published as issues of the open-access Journal of Physics: Conference Series.


Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory (SAQMBT)

The Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory (SAQMBT) is published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. (Singapore), under an agreement with the IAC of the RPMBT Series of Conferences. The IAC selects the Series Editorial Board, who in turn are responsible for the commission of individual Volumes in the Series.

Announcement: Open Call for Suggested Future Volumes in the Series

If you are interested in publishing a future volume in the SAQMBT Series, the Series Editorial Board invites you to contact the Editor-in-Chief to discuss your ideas informally in the first place.

SAQMBT Series Editorial Board

The current members of the SAQMBT Series Editorial Board are:

Current Volumes in the SAQMBT Series

Published volumes in the SAQMBT Series include:

VOLUME PUBLICATION YEAR TITLE AUTHORS NUMBER OF PAGES ISBN
Vol. 1 1998 Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories (The Proceedings of the 9th International Conference; Sydney, Australia, 21 - 25 July 1997) David Neilson and Raymond F. Bishop (eds.) pp. xxx+516 978-981-02-3369-3 (hardcover)
Vol. 3 2000 Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories (The Proceedings of the 10th International Conference; Seattle, USA, 10 – 15 September 1999) Raymond F. Bishop, Klaus A. Gernoth, Niels R. Walet, and Yang Xian (eds.) pp. xviii+491 978-981-02-4318-0 (hardcover) / 978-981-279-275-4 (ebook)
Vol. 4 2002 Microscopic Approaches To Quantum Liquids In Confined Geometries Eckhard Krotscheck and Jesus Navarro (eds.) pp. xii+422 978-981-02-4640-2 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-847-5 (ebook)
Vol. 5 2001 150 Years Of Quantum Many-Body Theory (A Festschrift in Honour of the 65th Birthdays of John W. Clark, Alpo J. Kallio, Manfred L. Ristig, and Sergio Rosati; UMIST, Manchester, UK, 10 – 14 July 2000) Raymond F. Bishop, Klaus A. Gernoth, and Niels R. Walet (eds.) pp. xii+345 978-981-02-4730-0 (hardcover) / 978-981-279-976-0 (ebook)
Vol. 6 2002 Recent Progress In Many-Body Theories (The Proceedings of the 11th International Conference; Manchester, UK, 9 – 13 July 2001) Raymond F. Bishop, Tobias Brandes, Klaus A. Gernoth, Niels R. Walet, and Yang Xian (eds.) pp. xix+499 978-981-02-4888-8 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-784-3 (ebook)
Vol. 7 2002 Introduction To Modern Methods Of Quantum Many-Body Theory And Their Applications Adelchi Fabrocini, Stefano Fantoni, and Eckhard Krotscheck (eds.) pp. xii+413 978-981-238-069-2 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-707-2 (ebook)
Vol. 8 2006 Pairing in Fermionic Systems: Basic Concepts and Modern Applications Armen Sedrakian, John W Clark, and Mark Alford (eds.) pp. x+285 978-981-256-907-3 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-304-3 (ebook)
Vol. 9 2006 Recent Progress In Many-Body Theories (The Proceedings of the 12th International Conference; Santa Fe, New Mexico, 23 – 27 August 2004) Joseph A Carlson and Gerardo Ortiz (eds.) pp. xiv+270 978-981-256-957-8 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-289-3 (ebook)
Vol. 10 2006 Recent Progress In Many-Body Theories (The Proceedings of the 13th International Conference; Buenos Aires, Argentina, 5 – 9 December 2005) Susana Hernández and Horacio Cataldo (eds.) pp. xiii+408 978-981-270-035-3 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-278-7 (ebook)
Vol. 11 2008 Recent Progress In Many-Body Theories (The Proceedings of the 14th International Conference; Barcelona, Spain, 16 – 20 July 2007) Jordi Boronat, Gregory Astrakharchik, and Ferran Mazzanti (eds.) pp. xviii+439 978-981-277-987-8 (hardcover) / 978-981-277-988-5 (ebook)

The Development of Quantum Many-Body Theory

Quantum many-body theory as a discipline in its own right dates largely from the 1950's, and is hence in many senses already a mature subject. Despite this apparent maturity the field remains vibrant and active, vigorous and exciting, vital and important. Indeed, the successes, importance and vitality of the field as the 20th century drew to its close, were very clearly recognized, for example, by the sharing of the 1998 Nobel Prizes in both Physics and Chemistry by the many-body theorists Robert Laughlin, Walter Kohn and John Pople. Earlier Nobel Laureates who obtained their awards for work in quantum many-body physics include: Lev Landau (1962), John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer (1972), Philip Anderson, Sir Nevill Mott, and John van Vleck (1977). The most recent have been Alexei Abrikosov, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Tony Leggett (2003).

It is impossible to date the precise origin of quantum many-body theory as a subject in its own right. Nevertheless, even if 1958 is not the actual year of its birth, that year marks a particularly significant milestone in its development. Although much important work was done earlier, even considerably earlier, that single year and the few around it saw the publication of a large number of seminal papers by such forefathers of the field as Eugene Feenberg, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Jeffrey Goldstone, Lev Landau, David Pines and many, many others. Possibly the most important of those others is Keith Brueckner, whose path-breaking work dates from even earlier in the 1950's.

The history (and immediate pre-history) of the series itself provides a mirror in which to view later developments in the subject, as we discuss below.

Today, quantum many-body theory stands as one of the three great pillars of modern theoretical physics, together with quantum field theory and statistical physics. While quantum many-body theory was born largely out of quantum field theory in the 1950's, the two subjects thereafter have led rather separate lives. In recent years, however, the boundaries between them have again become eroded. Indeed, several papers in this volume concern themselves very productively with topics on this boundary. There is little doubt that the barriers between all three fields will increasingly be surmounted in the coming years, to their mutual advantage, leading to an increasing commonality of both approach and areas of discourse.


Pre-History of the RPMBT Series

In the 1970's the applications of quantum many-body theory in nuclear physics were becoming sufficiently varied and sophisticated that a number of conferences on the subject were organized. With hindsight it is clear that these formed the impetus to the later development of the conference series on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories (RPMBT). The most important of these early meetings, which can be regarded in many ways as having been RPMBT-0, is the 1972 conference on The Nuclear Many-Body Problem organized by F. Calogero and C. Ciofi degli Atti in Rome. Additionally, and before the official beginning of the RPMBT series, there were two very significant workshops held in 1975 and 1977 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA with Vijay Pandharipande as the chief organizer.

The attendees of the latter of these two meetings, the Workshop on Nuclear and Dense Matter, held during May 3-6, 1977, are shown in the photograph. It is noteworthy how many of those who either already were, or who later turned out to become, key figures in the field of quantum many-body theory, attended this meeting.
Workshop on Nuclear and Dense Matter (Urbana, IL, USA; May 3-6, 1977) Attendees
The photograph is noteworthy in several respects:
  • Firstly, in view of the special Feenberg Award discussed below, which is named after him, it depicts Eugene Feenberg at one of the relatively few conferences he ever attended. Although we know with certainty that he had fully intended to attend the RPMBT-1 meeting, he died in 1977, a year before it was held.
  • Secondly, it shows that this precursor Urbana meeting was attended by four future Feenberg Awardees.
A detailed list of those portrayed in the photograph can be found by clicking on the picture.


History of the RPMBT Series

In response to the several precursor meetings discussed above that accentuated the need for a continuing series, the first official RPMBT meeting, RPMBT-1, was held in Trieste in 1978,. A full list of the conferences held to date is as follows:

  • RPMBT-1:
 Trieste, Italy; 1978 (2 - 7 October, 1978)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Claudio Ciofi degli Atti (Chair), Sergio Rosati, and Alpo Kallio.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • The conference was dedicated to the memory of Eugene Feenberg who, at an early stage of planning of this conference, was on the list of invited speakers, but who sadly died before the meeting took place.
  • The clearly stated purpose of this first RPMBT conference was, as in all following meetings, to gather together people from different fields of many-body theory such as nuclear physics, quantum liquids and dense matter in order to help promote exchange of new ideas between the different fields . An example of such a development has been the hypernetted chain (HNC) theory of classical statistical mechanics which was first applied to quantum fluids and now also to nuclear many-body problems. This has become then a rather prominent subject at this conference.
  • An excellent conference Summary Talk titled "Update on the Crisis in Nuclear-Matter Theory: A Summary of the Trieste Conference" was given by John Clark.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Nuclear Physics A 328, Issues 1–2, Pages 1-600 (1 October 1979).
  • RPMBT-2:
 Oaxtepec, Mexico; 1981 (12 - 17 January, 1981)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
John W. Clark (Chair), Mauricio Fortes, Manuel de Llano, and John G. Zabolitzky.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • An idiosyncratic conference Summary Talk was given by Keith Brueckner.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, (eds. J.G. Zabolitzky, M. de Llano, M. Fortes and J.W. Clark), Lecture Notes in Physics, Vol. 142 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1981).
  • RPMBT-3:
 Odenthal-Altenberg, Germany; 1983 (29 August - 3 September, 1983)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Hermann Kümmel (Co-Chair), Manfred L. Ristig (Co-Chair), Charles E. Campbell, and Sergio Rosati.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A concise but very incisive conference Summary Talk, which is included in the Conference Proceedings (see below), was given by Lou H. Nosanow. In his summary he states that: "The subject matter covered in this conference can be classified under the following four major headings: (1) systems of nucleons, (2) quantum liquids, (3) systems of electrons, and (4) techniques." He also farsightedly, and rather accurately, predicted future trends and opportunities in the field of quantum many-body theory.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, (eds. H. Kümmel and M.L. Ristig), Lecture Notes in Physics, Vol. 198 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1984).
  • RPMBT-4:
 San Francisco, California, USA; 1985 (12 - 17 August, 1985)

The Local Organising Committee comprised:

Roger A. Smith (Chair), Phil J. Siemens, and John G. Zabolitzky.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
The Proceedings of the conference were not published.
  • RPMBT-5:
 Oulu, Finland; 1987 (3 - 8 August, 1987)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Alpo J. Kallio (Chair), Jouko Arponen, Risto Nieminen, Erkki Pajanne, and Chris J. Pethick.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • The meeting included a Panel Discussion, chaired by Neil W. Ashcroft, to consider the latest developments of the then extremely rapidly growing field of high-Tc superconductivity, after the discovery in the previous year of the ceramic cuprate superconductors by Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz.
  • At the meeting a presentation was made to Hermann Kümmel to mark his 65th birthday and his impending retirement from the Chair in Theoretical Nuclear Physics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, at the end of a special Tribute talk by John Zabolitzky, titled "Professor Hermann G. Kümmel - 65 Years", which is included in the Proceedings (see below).
  • A special Tribute talk was given by Ray Bishop, titled "Correlated Basis Functions and All That: A Tribute to John W. Clark, Recipient of the Second Feenberg Award", which is included in the Proceedings (see below).
  • The conference Summary Talk, titled "Whither Many-Body Theory? - A Summary of the Oulu Meeting", was given by John Clark, and is included in the Proceedings (see below).
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, Vol. 1, (eds. A.J. Kallio, E. Pajanne, and R.F. Bishop), (Plenum, New York, 1988).
  • RPMBT-6:
 Arad, Israel; 1989 (5 - 10 November, 1989)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Yshai Avishai (Chair), Aron Lonke, Ora Entin, Hanoch Gutfreund, Yoseph Imry, Moshe Kaveh, and M. Revsen.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A half-day Special Session was held on recent developments in high-Tc superconductivity, together with an evening Round Table discussion on the future of the field.
  • This meeting was perhaps the first in the series at which several talks were given by experimentalists.
  • Other Special Sessions were devoted to: (a) localization (including the propagation of waves in disordered media, and (b) the then rapidly growing area of mesoscopic systems.
  • An excellent conference Summary Talk was given by Hermann G. Kümmel, which is included in the Proceedings (see below).
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, Vol. 2, (ed. Y. Avishai), (Plenum, New York, 1990).
  • RPMBT-7:
 Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; 1991 (26 - 31 August, 1991)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Charles E. Campbell (Co-Chair), Eckhard Krotscheck (Co-Chair), Siu A. Chin, John W. Clark and J. Woods Halley.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A lively and delightful talk entitled "L. D. Landau - His Life, Achievements and my own Memories" was was given by A. A. Abrikosov.
  • For the first time in the Series the meeting included invited Overview Talks given by several eminent speakers on particular areas of interest.
  • One day (Wednesday, 28th August) of the meeting was allotted to the Symposium on Large-Scale Computational Approaches to Many-Body Systems, which was held at the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute. Mal H. Kalos presented the Keynote Talk for the Symposium, which is included in the Proceedings (see below).
  • The Conference Outing on the following day (Thursday, 29th August) comprised a delightful river cruise on the Mississippi that was "officially" described in the conference Summary Talk (see below) as: "The trip through the locks was the perfect recreation for weary physicists, who acted more like children than adults as the water level dropped 50 feet."
  • The conference Summary Talk was given by A.L. ("Sandy") Fetter, and is included in the Proceedings (see below).
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, Vol. 3, (eds. T.L. Ainsworth, C.E. Campbell, B.E. Clements, and E. Krotscheck), (Plenum, New York, 1992).
  • RPMBT-8:
 Schloss Seggau, Styria, Austria; 1994 (22 - 27 August, 1994)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Ewald Schachinger, Heinrich Mitter, and Heinrich Sormann.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A Special Session was dedicated to the life and work of Ludwig Boltzmann, celebrating the 150th year of his birth.
  • After their successful introduction at the last conference, the meeting again included invited Overview Talks on particular areas of interest.
  • The castle venue itself, Schloß Seggau, sitting on top of the Frauenberg and overlooking the town of Leibnitz and the flood plains of the rivers Sulm and Mur, provided a remarkable and memorable setting for the meeting.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, Vol. 4, (eds. E. Schachinger, H. Mitter, and H. Sormann), (Plenum, New York, 1995).
  • RPMBT-9:
 Sydney, Australia; 1997 (21 - 25July, 1997)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
David Neilson (Chair), ??????
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A Special Session was devoted to theories for many-electron systems in zero dimensions (quantum dots), one dimension (quantum wires), and two dimensions (electron layers). By the time of this meeting these low-dimensional electronic systems are firmly established as fertile sources of novel and challenging many-body phenomena.
  • The conference was also the 7th in the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Series of "Gordon Godfrey International Workshops on Theoretical Physics". The late Gordon Godfrey was an Associate Professor at UNSW, who bequeathed his estate for the promotion and teaching of theoretical physics within the community.
  • The conference was attended by 124 participants from 24 countries.
  • The Proceedings of this conference form the inaugural volume of the Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, published by World Scientific (Singapore) under the auspices of the International Advisory Committee of the RPMBT Conference Series.
  • The Proceedings (see below) include a Tribute by John Clark to the memory of Eugene P. Bashkin (1952 - 1997).
  • The Conference Outing included a memorable cruise on Sydney Harbour.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference, (eds. D. Neilson and R.F. Bishop), Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, Vol. 1 (World Scientific, Singapore, 1998).
  • RPMBT-10:
 Seattle, Washington, USA; 1999 (10 – 15 September, 1999)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Aurel Bulgac (Chair), Larry Wilets (Co-Chair), R.H. Anderson, George Bertsch, Ernest Henley, Mike Miller, John Rehr, William Reinhardt, and David Thouless.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • This conference saw the first introduction to the series of Sessions on Bose-Einstein Condensates and Quantum Dots and Chaos. QCD-related problems and neutron star physics were also given prominence for the first time in the series.
  • In advance of the meeting a special prize, donated by George Bertsch of the University of Washington, Seattle, together with Victor A. Khodel, was announced. The prize was to be awarded at the meeting for the best submitted paper offering a solution to a particular many-body problem posed by Bertsch, which had been inspired as a parameter-free model of neutron matter at subnuclear density, and which was the originator of many later investigations of the unitary Fermi gas. The winner was declared at the meeting to be George A. Baker,Jr., of Los Alamos National Laboratory. His RPMBT-10 Challenge Competition Winning Entry is included in the Conference Proceedings (see below).
  • A Special Session was devoted to Brueckner theory. The session was dedicated to Keith Brueckner, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, to celebrate his many contributions to many-body theory. Keith Brueckner himself spoke in that session on the years of his own work on the subject, in a talk titled Highlights in Many-Body Physics.
  • The Conference Banquet took place aboard a memorable boat cruise alongside the beautiful Kitsap peninsula, which lies west of Seattle across Puget Sound.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference, (eds. R.F. Bishop, K.A. Gernoth, N.R. Walet and Y. Xian), Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, Vol. 3 (World Scientific, Singapore, 2000).
  • RPMBT-11:
 Manchester, UK; 2001 (9 – 13 July, 2001)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Raymond F. Bishop (Chair), Tobias Brandes, Klaus A. Gernoth, Niels R. Walet, and Yang Xian.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • This conference saw the first introduction to the series of a Session on Quantum Magnetism.
  • For the first time in the series a Student Day was held on the Sunday preceding the conference. Three well-known researchers and gifted teachers, Steve Girvin, Dirk Walecka, and Philippe Nozières introduced frontier fields of many-body physics to a large crowd of graduate students. The topics were Quantum Spins and Phase Transitions (Girvin), Effective Field theory in Nuclear Many-Body Physics (Walecka), and Bose-Einstein Condensation and The Mott Metal-Insulator Transition (Nozières).
  • A Special Session was held to honor the approaching 80th birthday of Hermann Kümmel, one of the founders of coupled cluster theory. After an introduction by Ray Bishop, Hermann Kümmel spoke on A Biography of the Coupled Cluster Method. Ray's talk, A Tribute to Hermann Kümmel on His 80th Birthday is included in the Conference Proceedings (see below). Other speakers of the session included his colleague and friend Fritz Coester, who himself should be counted among the founders of the coupled cluster method, but who pointed to Hermann Kümmel as the real promoter with the words "He kept insisting on using it."
  • A memorable Conference Banquet was held among the working engines in the Power Hall of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference, (eds. R.F. Bishop, T. Brandes, K.A. Gernoth, N.R. Walet and Y. Xian), Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, Vol. 6 (World Scientific, Singapore, 2002); and
also in: International Journal of Modern Physics B 17, Number 28, Pages 4947-5493 (10 November 2003).
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; 2004 (23 – 27 August, 2004)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Joe Carlson (Chair), Gerardo Ortiz, and Eddy Timmermans.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • This conference saw the first introduction to the series of sessions on Cold Atom Physics and Quantum Information and Many-Body Physics.
  • A memorable conference Keynote Speech, titled The Future Lies Ahead, was given by Phil W. Anderson at the historic Palace of the Governors. It provided a thought-provoking talk on present-day tribulations in physics, but with a positive outlook on the long-term future of science, and it is included in the Conference Proceedings (see below).
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference, (eds. J.A. Carlson and G. Ortiz), Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, Vol. 9 (World Scientific, Singapore, 2005); and
also in: International Journal of Modern Physics B 20, Number 19, Pages 2569-2823 (30 July 2006).
Buenos Aires, Argentina; 2005 (5 – 9 December, 2005)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Susana Hernández (Chair), Leszek Szybisz, Ana María Llois, Willy Dussel, and Horacio Cataldo.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A Special Session was held to celebrate the 70th birthdays of John Clark and Manfred Ristig, whose very substantial contributions to many-body physics were warmly recalled by Chuck Campbell and Leszek Szybisz. Their Tributes , are included in the Conference Proceedings (see below).
  • The memorable venue for the conference was the extremely striking and imposing Facultad de Derecho (Law School) building of the University of Buenos Aires (pictured below).
  • An extremely enjoyable Conference Banquet took place at "Los Años Locos" restaurant (and see photo below).
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference, (eds. S. Hernández and H. Cataldo), Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, Vol. 10 (World Scientific, Singapore, 2006); and
also in: International Journal of Modern Physics B 20, Number 30n31, Pages 4973-5356 (20 December 2006).
Barcelona, Spain; 2007 (16 – 20 July, 2007)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Jordi Boronat (Chair), Artur Polls, Jesús Navarro, Joaquim Casulleras, Ferran Mazzanti, Muntsa Guilleumas, and Gregory Astrakharchik.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
The Proceedings of the conference were published in:
Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories - Proceedings of the 14th International Conference, (eds. J. Boronat, G.E. Astrakharchik, and F. Mazzanti), Series on Advances in Quantum Many-Body Theory, Vol. 11 (World Scientific, Singapore, 2008).
Columbus, Ohio, USA; 2009 (27 - 31 July, 2009)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Nandini Trivedi (Chair), Eric Braaten, Richard Furnstahl, Tin-Lun Ho, and Mohit Randeria.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A Student Day was held on the Sunday preceding the conference, during which a series of very well received pedagogical tutorials was given by Gabi Kotliar (who spoke on Dynamical Mean-Field Theory), Samir Mathur (who spoke on AdS/CFT: String Theory Meets Many-Body Physics), Mohit Randeria (who spoke on BCS-BEC Crossover and the Unitary Fermi Gas), and Subir Sachdev (who spoke on Quantum Critical Phenomena).
  • This conference saw the first introduction to the series of Optical Lattices as a topic (although the first talk in the Series on the subject had been given much earlier by Marcus Greiner at RPMBT-12: in Santa Fe).
  • Following a Public Lecture on Wednesday, July 29 by Martin Zwierlein on The coldest matter in the Universe -- Bose-Einstein condensates of atoms and molecules, held at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI, Columbus) as part of the Conference, an enjoyable Reception and Conference Banquet were also held there.
  • Two lively and interesting 45-minute Discussion Sessions were held during the meeting, one on Computational Many-Body Physics and the other on AdS/CFT Correspondence.
The Proceedings of the conference were not published, but most of the presentations of the Invited Talks (including the Feenberg and Kümmel Award lectures and the Sunday tutorials) are available online.
Bariloche, Argentina; 2011 (28 November - 2 December, 2011)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Karen Hallberg (Chair), Pablo Cornaglia, Daniel García, and Gonzalo Usaj.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • A lively Round Table Discussion on the Status, Directions and Prospects of the Field was held, with interesting conclusions, on the state of the art of many-body physics research.
  • The ANDES/ALPS School on Numerical Methods for Many-Body Theories was held immediately following the meeting during the period 2 - 5 December, 2011. The School was aimed at advanced students in physics and chemistry, and covered several of the most important numerical methods used in Quantum Many-Body Theory. It included hands-on activities to reinforce practical learning of the computational methods. This very successful School attracted around 50 students from several countries, mainly Latin American.
  • A splendid gallery of photographs was taken during the meeting, which nicely portrays its feel and atmosphere.
The Proceedings of the conference were not published, but most of the presentations of the Invited Talks (including the Feenberg and Kümmel Award lectures) are available online.
Rostock, Germany; 2013 (8 - 13 September, 2013)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Heidi Reinholz (Chair), Niels-Uwe Bastian, Dieter Bauer, Marina Hertzfeldt, Sonja Lorenzen, Volker Mosert, and Gerd Röpke.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • The topic High Energy-Density Matter and Intense Lasers was included to reflect the emphasis of the local many-body physics community.
  • A satellite workshop on Clustering Aspects in Nuclei and Nuclear Matter was held during and after the conference.
  • All of the prior winners of the Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award, up to and including the present winner, were present at the meeting (see photo below) and gave excellent Invited Talks.
The Proceedings of the conference were published as:
Volume 529 of the open-access Journal of Physics: Conference Series; and
many of the presentations of the Invited Talks are also available online.
Buffalo, NY, USA; 2015 (16 - 21 August, 2015)
The Local Organising Committee comprised:
Eckhard Krotscheck (Chair), Jong Han, Shegeji Fujita, Xuedong Hu, Peihong Zhang, and Igor Zutic.
Some Highlights of the meeting:
  • The Cold Atom Session was dedicated in honor of celebrating Gordon Baym's 80th Birthday.
  • The Nuclear Physics Session was dedicated in honor of celebrating John W. Clark's 80th Birthday.
  • The international symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids QFS2015A was held the week before the conference.
  • All of the prior winners of the Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award, up to and including the present winner, were present at the meeting (see photo below) and gave excellent Invited Talks.
The Proceedings of the conference were published as:
Volume 702 of the open-access Journal of Physics: Conference Series; and
many of the presentations of the Invited Talks are also available online.

The general format and style of the conferences have undergone some changes that have reflected the developments of the field since its inception. At the first meeting, much excitement came from the development of several new methods for the quantum many-body problem. At a time where the community largely considered the field as "mature", new impetus came from realizing that not all was well with the many-body problem. This realization, first vocalized and brought to the attention of the community by John Clark, became known as the crisis in nuclear-matter theory. It arose when the variational results for the ground-state energy of nuclear matter, obtained from low-order variational calculations using Jastrow-correlated trial wave functions, were found to lie significantly below the corresponding results obtained, with the same nucleon-nucleon potentials, from lowest-order Brueckner theory in the perturbative framework. The resolution of this crisis taught us much about both of the main technological branches of quantum many-body theory, namely the variational-theoretic and the perturbation-theoretic, and the interrelations between both. John Clark gave a Summary Talk at RPMBT-1 in which he focused on giving an update on the crisis in nuclear-matter theory, including a recap of the problem.

Even more importantly, it led to the creation of a common language through which the practitioners in these previously quite disparate branches could communicate with, and learn from, each other. The first few meetings of the series were the forum where the "second-generation" many-body theories were publicized and discussed: fully optimized Jastrow-Feenberg and CBF methods, a tremendous development of coupled cluster theory (the "extended coupled cluster method"), parquet-theory and, last but not least, stochastic methods which took advantage of the ever-increasing computational power. This quest for a common language has remained a great unifying strength ever since. The early meetings in the RPMBT series also taught us that such existing techniques as correlated basis function theory and the coupled cluster method were already both extremely versatile and very accurate in practice. We learned too that what seemed to be needed much more than new techniques were better and more powerful systematic truncation or approximation hierarchies, based on the physics of the system to which they were being applied, and possibly also on marriages between existing methods.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of contributions to many-body theory. On the one hand there are those devoted to the development of new methods and techniques, and the refinement of existing ones. On the other hand there are those contributions which seek to understand and to explain emergent many-body phenomena in particular systems. Such systems themselves may be either highly simplified models, for which various exact results often play a key role, or more or less close representations of actual physical systems, for which extensive numerical computations are usually required. The earliest meetings in the series, up to and including RPMBT-3 at least, were largely characterized by concentrating on techniques rather than on specific problems. The most active fields of application were the nuclear many-body problem and the quantum fluids 3He, 4He and their mixtures.

Over the years, the focus shifted somewhat from many-body techniques to many-body phenomena. By the time of RPMBT-4, held in San Francisco in 1985, although nuclear problems and quantum fluids remained the main test-beds of many-body methods, a more visible response to recent experimental developments was apparent. Such topics as the quantum Hall effect, heavy fermions, Anderson localization, and the quark-gluon plasma became the foci for debate. With hindsight, RPMBT-5 in Oulu in 1987 was probably the first meeting in the series in which there was enough apparent confidence in the tools of quantum many-body theory to stress more their ability to be widely applied to the newer and less traditional fields of application. Very soon after the discovery in 1986 by Bednorz and Müller of the high transition-temperature superconductivity in the ceramic cuprate materials, applications of quantum many-body methods to them were being discussed at RPMBT-5. By the time of RPMBT-6 in Arad in 1989 the Hubbard model and its variants were firmly ensconced on the agenda.

Since RPMBT-5 recurring themes have included heavy fermions, the quantum Hall effect, disordered systems, localization, complex systems and chaos, mesoscopic systems, and the development and application of quantum Monte Carlo methods. Sessions on lattice Hamiltonian problems and strongly correlated electronic systems have become particularly firm fixtures. At the same time new twists on such old friends as quantum fluids and nuclear and subnuclear matter have continued to surprise and delight us, and many of these have been recorded in recent proceedings of the RPMBT series, together with other such topical sessions as Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum dots and chaos, and such old friends with renewed vigor as density functional theory. Other recent topics have included new developments in biological physics, quantum computing and allied areas of quantum information thoery, and quantum control.

A major challenge of meetings since around RPMBT-10 has been to define and explore the important areas of overlap of quantum many-body theory with quantum field theory and, increasingly, with statistical physics, in such likely arenas as

  • phase transitions and the related competing effects of quantum versus thermal fluctuations
  • spontaneous symmetry breaking
  • the unifying role of gauge invariance (and perhaps other symmetries)
  • concepts from complexity theory, including the role of correlations and fluctuations in complex systems, and the competition between analysis and synthesis as modes of understanding many-body systems
  • entropy and its generation and flow

Gallery of Past RPMBT Meetings

  • RPMBT-2 (12 - 17 January, 1981)
    (Oaxtepec, Mexico) Conference Attendees

  • RPMBT-3 (29 August - 3 September, 1983)
    (Altenberg, Germany) Conference Attendees

  • RPBMT-11 (9 – 13 July, 2001)
    (Manchester, UK) Conference Logo

  • RPBMT-11 (9 – 13 July, 2001)
    (Manchester, UK) Conference Attendees

  • RPBMT-12 (23 – 27 August, 2004)
    (Santa Fe, NM, USA) Conference Poster

  • RPBMT-12 (23 – 27 August, 2004)
    (Santa Fe, NM, USA) Conference Attendees

  • RPBMT-12 (23 – 27 August, 2004)
    (Santa Fe, NM, USA) Feenberg medalists L. Gor'kov and S. Belyaev

  • RPMBT-13 (5 – 9 December, 2005)
    (Buenos Aires, Argentina) Conference Venue

  • RPMBT-13 (5 – 9 December, 2005)
    (Buenos Aires, Argentina) Conference Banquet

  • RPBMT-14 (16 – 20 July, 2007)
    (Barcelona, Spain) Conference Logo

  • RPBMT-14 (16 – 20 July, 2007)
    (Barcelona, Spain) Conference Attendees

  • RPBMT-15 (27 - 31 July, 2009)
    (Columbus, Ohio, USA) Conference Poster

  • RPBMT-16 (28 November - 2 December, 2011)
    (Bariloche, Argentina) Conference Poster

  • RPBMT-16 (28 November - 2 December, 2011)
    (Bariloche, Argentina) Conference Attendees

  • RPBMT-17 (8 - 13 September, 2013)
    (Rostock, Germany) Conference Poster

  • RPBMT-17 (8 - 13 September, 2013)
    (Rostock, Germany) Conference Attendees

  • RPBMT-17 (8 - 13 September, 2013)
    (Rostock, Germany) All previous Kuemmel Awardees present at the meeting

  • RPBMT-18 (16 - 21 August, 2015)
    (Buffalo, NY, USA) Conference Poster

  • RPBMT-18 (16 - 21 August, 2015)
    (Buffalo, NY, USA) Conference Attendees

Feenberg Memorial Medal

Feenberg Medal

The Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal (or Feenberg Award) was established by the many-body physics community at the Third International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories (RPMBT-3) in 1983 as a continuing memorial to Eugene Feenberg. It commemorates his wise stewardship of a field that penetrates into all branches of physics; his deep physical insights and great formal achievements; his dedicated service as teacher and mentor; and the exemplary integrity of his personal and professional life. The Feenberg Award thus serves to preserve the memory of the unique and enduring contributions of Eugene Feenberg to physics, especially to the foundations of nuclear physics and microscopic quantum many-body physics of nuclei and quantum fluids.

The Eugene Feenberg Medal is awarded under the auspices of the International Advisory Committee of the series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories. The Feenberg Medal, first awarded in 1985, is designated for work that is firmly established and which can be demonstrated to have significantly advanced the field of many-body physics. The work considered can be accumulative contributions sustained over time, or a single important contribution. In appropriate cases, the award can be shared by as many as three people for a single body of work. The Feenberg Award Rules are listed below.

Past recipients have included Walter Kohn (1991) and Anthony J. Leggett (1999), both of whom later won a Nobel Prize for their work, in 1998 and 2003, respectively.

A full list of Feenberg Medallists is given below, together with their respective citations.

List of Feenberg Awardees and their Citations

NAME OF WINNER YEAR OF AWARD MEETING OF AWARD CITATION
David PINES 1985 RPMBT4; San Francisco [cttee chaired by Chuck Campbell] "for his seminal contributions to the foundations of quantum many-body theory and for path-breaking applications to many-electron systems, neutron stars, and elementary excitations in quantum fluids"
John W. CLARK 1987 RPMBT5; Oulu [cttee chaired by Ray Bishop] "for his development of the method of correlated basis functions into one of the most powerful microscopic techniques in quantum many-body theory, and for his applications of it in nuclear physics, especially to nuclear matter"
Malvin H. KALOS 1989 RPMBT6; Arad [cttee chaired by Fred Ristig] "for his pioneering, highly original, and profound corpus of work on stochastic methods in quantum many-body theory, specifically for his invention of the Green's function quantum Monte Carlo method, and for his early recognition of the importance of computational physics and high-performance computing to meet its needs"
Walter KOHN 1991 RPMBT7; Minneapolis [cttee chaired by Chris Pethick] "for his seminal contributions to theoretical solid-state physics, and for his development of the density-functional theory that has revolutionized the calculation of electronic structure for atoms, molecules, surfaces, and solids in physics, chemistry, and materials science"
David M. CEPERLEY 1994 RPMBT8; Schloss Seggau [cttee chaired by John Clark] "for his path-breaking contributions to computational many-body physics that have brought our understanding of fundamental strongly-interacting quantum systems into a new era and that have opened the way to quantitative microscopic predictions of the properties of real, complex materials"
Lev P. PITAEVSKIĬ 1997 RPMBT9; Sydney [cttee chaired by Luciano Reatto] "for his seminal contributions to the theory of Bose superfluids and the helium liquids, specifically for his studies of fluctuations close to the lambda transition and of elementary excitations and vorticity in a superfluid, which have provided a cornerstone of our understanding of key aspects of superfluid 4He and that has now expanded to the field of cold bosonic atoms"
Anthony J. LEGGETT 1999 RPMBT10; Seattle [cttee chaired by Andy Jackson] "for his seminal contributions to many-body physics, including the explanation of fundamental properties of superfluid 3-He in the millikelvin regime, new insights into macroscopic quantum coherence, and the theoretical exploration of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates"
Philippe NOZIÈRES 2001 RPMBT11; Manchester [cttee chaired by Eckhard Krotscheck] "for his rigorous development of the theory of a normal Fermi liquid, which provided a firm microscopic foundation for the Landau theory, and for his definitive work on the properties of the free electron gas, particularly in the regime of realistic metallic densities"
Spartak T. BELYAEV 2004 RPMBT12; Santa Fe [cttee chaired by John Negele] "for his pioneering work on superfluidity, particularly his independent introduction of the revolutionary concept of anomalous propagators and their application to dilute Bose liquids and to pairing in nuclear matter, which changed our understanding of the physics of quantum many-body systems with a formulation that has become the standard language of the subject"
Lev P. GOR'KOV 2004 "for his pioneering work on superconductivity that goes far beyond the original BCS theory through his independent development and application of the revolutionary concept of anomalous propagators, a formulation that has become the standard language of the subject"
Raymond F. BISHOP 2005 RPMBT13; Buenos Aires [cttee chaired by Chuck Campbell] "for his development of the coupled-cluster method toward a comprehensive ab initio approach, and for his innovative applications of it across the full spectrum of subfields of quantum many-body physics"
Hermann G. KÜMMEL 2005 "for his role in the creation and early development of the coupled-cluster method, and for his pioneering high-accuracy applications of it to problems in nuclear and subnuclear physics"
Stefano FANTONI 2007 RPMBT14; Barcelona [cttee chaired by Jordi Boronat] "for his leading role in the development and extensive applications of the correlated basis function method, including the advance of Fermi hypernetted chain theory, thereby providing an accurate, quantitative, microscopic description of strongly-interacting quantum many-body systems, especially for finite atomic nuclei"
Eckhard KROTSCHECK 2007 "for his leading role in the development and extensive applications of the correlated basis function method, including the advance of Fermi hypernetted chain theory, thereby providing an accurate, quantitative, microscopic description of strongly-interacting quantum many-body systems, especially for inhomogeneous quantum fluids"
J. Dirk WALECKA 2009 RPMBT15; Columbus [cttee chaired by Siu Chin] "for theoretical contributions in electroweak interactions with nuclei, the development of relativistic field theories of the nuclear many-body problem and unparalleled achievements in the education of a generation of young nuclear many-body physicists"
Gordon A. BAYM 2011 RPMBT16; Bariloche [cttee chaired by David Neilson] "for the self-consistent conserving approach to many-body perturbation theory that provided a solid platform for perturbative expansions, and for his novel applications of quantum many-body methods in nuclear physics, astrophysics, highly condensed matter, and atomic physics"
Leonid KELDYSH 2011 "for his extension of many-body perturbation theory to non-equilibrium systems. This technique continues to play a central role in numerous areas of many-body physics. His work on electron-hole plasmas in semiconductors is also recognized"
Patrick A. LEE 2013 RPMBT17; Rostock [cttee chaired by Hans Weidenmüller] "for his fundamental contributions to condensed matter theory, especially in regard to the quantum Hall effect, to universal conductance fluctuations, and to the Kondo effect in quantum dots"
Douglas J. SCALAPINO 2013 "for his imaginative use and development of the Monte Carlo approach and for his ground-breaking contributions to superconductivity"
Christopher J. PETHICK 2015 RPMBT18; Buffalo [cttee chaired by Arturo Polls] "For pioneering contributions and profound insights into many-body physics across diverse physical systems, ranging from ultracold atoms and quantum liquids to dense nuclear matter in neutron stars and stellar collapse"

Photograph Gallery of Feenberg Awardees

  • David Pines;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1985

  • John W. Clark;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1987

  • Malvin H. Kalos;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1989

  • Walter Kohn;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1991
    [Winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1998]

  • David M. Ceperley;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1994

  • Lev P. Pitaevskiĭ;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1997

  • Anthony J. Leggett;
    Feenberg Awardee, 1999
    [Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 2003]

  • Philippe Nozières;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2001

  • Lev. P. Gor'kov;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2004

  • Spartak T. Belyaev;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2004

  • Raymond F. Bishop;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2005

  • Hermann G. Kümmel;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2005

  • Stefano Fantoni;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2007

  • Eckhard Krotscheck;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2007

  • J. Dirk Walecka;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2009

  • Gordon A. Baym;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2011

  • Leonid Keldysh;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2011

  • Patrick A. Lee;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2013

  • Douglas J. Scalapino;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2013

  • Christopher J. Pethick;
    Feenberg Awardee, 2015

Feenberg Award Rules

In the following, the "Advisory Committee" means the "International Advisory Committee of the Series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories," and the "International Conference" or "Conference" means the "International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories."

I. General Rules:

A. The Feenberg Medal, or Feenberg Memorial Medal in Many-Body Physics, may be awarded for an important contribution or contributions to many-body theory.

B. In selecting recipients of the Medal, there will be no discrimination based on sex, age, race, nationality, religion, or political beliefs.

C. Members of the operative Selection Committee and their families and relatives are not eligible for receipt of the medal.

II. Award Ceremony:

A. The Medal will be awarded approximately every two years. The ceremony for awarding the Medal will be held at the International Conference for as long as these Conferences exist and retain a format similar to that of the first four Conferences. Thereafter the Advisory Committee should make appropriate arrangements for perpetuating the award and preserving its spirit.

B The Selection Committee will organize the ceremony in collaboration with the organizers of the Conference. The recipient of the award will be invited by the Conference organizers as an invited speaker.

C. The tribute to the awardee will be published in the proceedings of the Conference at which the Feenberg Medal was awarded. In the same proceedings an updated list of patrons, sponsors, and contributors is to be published.

D. Award dates will be fixed by mutual agreement of the Selection Committee (see below) and the Advisory Committee.

III. Selection Committee:

A. The Selection Committee which will decide on the award to be granted at the next Conference, and the Chairperson of that Selection Committee, are to be appointed by the Advisory Committee at each nternational Conference.

IV. Duties of the Selection Committee:

A. The Chairperson of the Selection Committee will organize the work of that Committee according to the present rules.

B. The Selection Committee will organize, with the agreement of the Advisory Committee, the publicity for collecting proposals for the recipient of the Medal.

C. Only one award will be given at each Conference, which award should be given preferably to one person, but to no more than three persons, and in any case for a single corpus of work.

D. The Selection Committee is charged with preparing a citation for general circulation, describing the achievements of the recipient or recipients which led to the award.

V. Rule Changes:

A. Any proposal for changing these rules should be advanced to the Advisory Committee by six months prior to its next meeting.

Brief Biography of Eugene Feenberg

Eugene Feenberg; October 6, 1906 — November 7, 1977
Photograph in the Obituary in Nucl. Phys. A 317 (1979).

Born October 6, 1906 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Eugene Feenberg received a B.A. in physics and M.A. in mathematics in 1929 from the University of Texas, Austin after three years of study. After a year and a half traveling in Europe as a Parker Traveling Fellow, visiting the groups of Sommerfeld, Pauli, and Fermi, he received his Ph.D. in 1933 from Harvard University, where his thesis advisor was E. C. Kemble. His thesis included the first statement and proof of the quantum optical theorem.

Subsequently Feenberg was Instructor or Fellow at Harvard, Wisconsin, and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, during which time he collaborated with Wigner, Bardeen, Breit and Phillips among others. After eight years on the faculty of New York University and four years during World War II at Sperry Gyroscope, Feenberg joined the faculty of Washington University (St. Louis) in 1946, and in 1964 became the Wayman Crow Professor of Physics, a chair previously held by Arthur H. Compton, Arthur L. Hughes, and Edward U. Condon.

Much of Feenberg's early research was concerned with the theory of the nucleus, culminating in the publication of Shell Theory of the Nucleus by Princeton University Press in 1955. While he had a career-long interest in perturbation theory, he turned his primary focus to the theory of quantum fluids, most notably the helium liquids, toward the end of the 1950's, a subject to which he would contribute very importantly for the next two decades until his death in 1977 . Along with his students, he developed the method of correlated basis functions in order to deal with the strong, short-range repulsion between helium atoms that makes the theory of the helium fluids virtually intractable using ordinary perturbation theory. The early part of this research is the subject of his monograph Theory of Quantum Fluids (Academic Press, 1969).

His willingness to tackle the challenge of strong, short-range correlations by developing a theoretical, ab initio framework to deal with them from first principles, characterizes much of Feenberg's research. As important as his research is, his personal integrity and high principles continue to serve as an inspiration for his former students and colleagues. The awarding of the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal serves as an opportunity to commemorate and perpetuate this man's unique influence on physics and physicists.



It is noteworthy that Issue 1 of Volume 317 of the journal Nuclear Physics A, published on 2 April 1979, is an invited volume dedicated to the memory of Eugene Feenberg. As the opening editorial pages record: "The first issue of this volume (pp. 1-286) is composed of papers dedicated to the memory of the late Professor Eugene Feenberg." The issue then begins with an obituary, signed by Keith Brueckner, Chuck Campbell, John Clark, and Henry Primakoff, which ends with a list of Feenberg's publications. The obituary also includes a photograph of Feenberg in front of a chalkboard, which is reproduced here to the right.


The reader interested in more details of Feenberg's life and legacy may find some in a talk by John W. Clark, entitled The Legacy of Eugene Feenberg at the Centenary of His Birth, which is included in the Conference Proceedings of RPMBT-13. This article also includes a splendid photograph of Eugene Feenberg in conversation with Joseph Hirschfelder and Richard Norberg, which was taken in the Pfeiffer Physics Library during the 1974 Washington University symposium that celebrated Feenberg's career.

Kümmel Early Achievement Award

The International Advisory Committee responsible for the International Conference series on "Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories" and for awarding the Feenberg Medal, decided at the Thirteenth International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories (RPMBT-13) in 2005 to establish a new award for young physicists whose published work is a significant contribution to quantum many-body theory. The Kümmel Award Rules are listed below.

The title of this award, "THE HERMANN KÜMMEL EARLY ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN MANY-BODY PHYSICS", honors Prof. Kümmel's long and distinguished career as a leader in the field and as a mentor for younger generations. It should be noted that Prof. Kümmel, together with Prof. Raymond Bishop, received the Feenberg medal in 2005 for their development of the Coupled-Cluster method.

A full list of Kümmel Awardees is given below, together with their respective citations.

List of Kümmel Awardees and their Citations

NAME OF WINNER YEAR OF AWARD MEETING OF AWARD CITATION
Frank VERSTRAETE 2007 RPMBT14; Barcelona [cttee chaired by Susana Hernandez] "for his pioneering work on the use of quantum information and entanglement theory in formulating new and powerful numerical simulation methods for use in strongly correlated systems, stochastic nonequilibrium systems, and strongly coupled quantum field theories"
Joaquin DRUT 2009 RPMBT15; Columbus [cttee chaired by Mikko Saarela] "for establishing the thermodynamic and pairing properties of a dilute spin-1/2 Fermi gas in the unitary regime using Quantum Monte Carlo and Field Theory methods"
Xiao-Liang QI 2011 RPMBT16; Bariloche [cttee chaired by Gerardo Ortiz] "for his contribution to the topological field theory of topological insulators"
Max METLITSKI 2013 RPMBT17; Rostock [cttee chaired by Ray Bishop] "for remarkable advances in the theory of quantum criticality in metals"
Lianyi HE 2015 RPMBT18; Buffalo [cttee chaired by Joe Carlson] "for pioneering work in the many-body theory of QCD at high isospin density and in the simulations of gauge fields in cold atoms"

Photograph Gallery of Kümmel Awardees

  • Frank Verstraete;
    Kümmel Awardee, 2007

  • Joaquin Drut;
    Kümmel Awardee, 2009

  • Xiaoliang Qi;
    Kümmel Awardee, 2011

  • Max Metlitski;
    Kümmel Awardee, 2013

  • Lianyi He;
    Kümmel Awardee, 2015

List of those receiving Honourable Mentions for the Kümmel Award and their citations

Selection Committees for the Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award have often also been deeply impressed by the achievements of other nominees. Since the Award may not be split, they have sometimes wished, however, to congratulate those who narrowly missed winning the Award in a given round by giving them Honourable Mentions. A full list of those is given below, together with their citations.

NAME YEAR OF HONOURABLE MENTION MEETING AT WHICH MENTIONED CITATION
Gregory ASTRAKHARCHIK 2007 RPMBT14; Barcelona [cttee chaired by Susana Hernandez] "for his most accurate microscopic calculation of the BEC-BCS crossover in dilute Fermi gases using quantum Monte Carlo techniques whose predictions have been recently confirmed by experiments"
Robert ZILLICH 2007 "for defining future directions of quantitative many-body theory by combining correlated basis functions methods with large scale Quantum Monte Carlo simulations to explore yet uncharted areas of strongly correlated quantum fluids physics"
Martin ECKSTEIN 2013 RPMBT17; Rostock [cttee chaired by Ray Bishop] "for his leading contributions in the development of non-equilibrium dynamical mean field theory"
Emanuel GULL 2013 "for the development of the Continuous-Time Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo Method and for its use in understanding the interplay of the pseudogap and superconductivity in the Hubbard model"
Kai SUN 2013 "for seminal contributions to the theory of topological effects in strongly correlated electron systems"

Photograph Gallery of those receiving Honourable Mentions for the Kümmel Award

  • Gregory Astrakharchik;
    Honourable Mention, Kümmel Award, 2007

  • Robert Zillich;
    Honourable Mention, Kümmel Award, 2007

  • Martin Eckstein;
    Honourable Mention, Kümmel Award, 2013

  • Emanuel Gull;
    Honourable Mention, Kümmel Award, 2013

  • Kai Sun;
    Honourable Mention, Kümmel Award, 2013

Kümmel Award Rules

TITLE: Hermann Kümmel Early Achievement Award in Many-Body Physics

PURPOSE: To encourage and reward excellence in the field of Quantum Many-Body Theory. The awardee will be selected on the basis of outstanding published work that has been recognised as comprising a significant advance in the field.

PRESENTATION: The award will be presented at the International Conference on Recent Progress in Many- Body Theories, to which the awardee will be invited to deliver a plenary talk. The local expenses plus the conference registration fee will be paid for the awardee to the same extent as for other invited speakers.

FREQUENCY: One award, which may not be split among more than one awardee, will be made at each meeting in the Series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories.

NOMINATIONS: Nominations should be forwarded to the Selection Committee by the established deadline, after a call issued by the committee. Nominations should include:

  • A brief description of the achievement contained in the work for which the award is to be considered, highlighting its importance to the field of quantum many-body theory and the original contributions of the nominee
  • A proposed citation for the award
  • A curriculum vitae of the nominee
  • A list of up to 3 relevant refereed publications that describe the work
  • No more than 3 letters of support.

CANDIDATES: Each candidate for the award must normally have received his or her PhD within a period of 6 years prior to the closing date for nominations.

SELECTION COMMITTEE: The awardee will be chosen by a Selection Committee whose Chair and other members will be appointed by the International Advisory Committee of the Series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories. Each member of the Selection Committee will serve no more than 2 consecutive terms.

TRIBUTE: A tribute to the awardee will be published in the official Proceedings of the Conference at which the award was made. The Selection Committee is charged with the preparation of the tribute and of the final citation for general circulation.

Brief Biography of Hermann Kümmel

Hermann Kümmel; October 7, 1922 — May 16, 2012

Hermann Kümmel was born in 1922 in Berlin. After obtaining his Diploma degree in 1950 from Humboldt University in East Berlin, he received the Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Free University in West Berlin, where he continued with his research until moving to Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, USA as a research associate. It was during his two years in Ames that, in collaboration with Fritz Coester, the foundations were laid for the birth of the coupled cluster method (CCM) for which he later became renowned. In 1960, Professors Kümmel and Coester published their seminal ideas of the CCM in the journal Nuclear Physics. After periods at the University of Tübingen, the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Chemistry in Mainz and the University of Mainz, and at Oklahoma State University as Professor of Physics, Professor Kümmel returned to Mainz as senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute, where he built a strong research group, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Mainz.

In 1969 Professor Kümmel moved with his entire research group to a Chair in Physics at the newly established Ruhr University in Bochum (RUB), Germany, where he established RUB as one of the world's leading centers in quantum many-body theory. In particular, it was at this time that he turned his attention to the theoretical development and computational application of the CCM to nuclear systems specifically and fermionic systems in general. The level of sophistication achieved in Bochum under his leadership, in both formal and computational strength, has rarely been matched elsewhere.

He retired in 1988 at the mandatory retirement age, retaining his association with RUB as Professor Emeritus. To mark his achievements in the field he was also elected as the first Honorary President of the International Advisory Committee for this RPMBT series of international conferences.

The reader interested in more details of Kümmel's life and legacy may find some in a talk entitled A Tribute to Hermann Kümmel on his 80th Birthday, which is included in the Conference Proceedings of RPMBT-11.

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