PHYSICS

Georgetown University physics professor Jim Freericks has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, an honor reserved for physicists who have made significant advances in knowledge through original research. APS cited Freericks’ seminal work applying dynamical mean-field theory to bulk and multilayered strongly correlated electron systems, significantly advancing the understanding of transport, light scattering, ordered phases and photoemission. “This is a major honor from the country’s leading professional society for physicists,” said Professor Jeff Urbach, Chair of Georgetown’s Department of Physics. “Jim’s been a pioneer in important areas of computational materials physics, and we congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition.” The Division of Condensed Matter Physics nominated Freericks for the fellowship. He was selected from a group of nominees by the Society’s governing council. Each year, less than one percent of the Society’s 46,000 members are recognized with this distinction. Freericks' research focuses on three main scientific themes: examining how X-rays change color as they scatter off of solid materials, modeling how electrical charge and heat flow through layered sandwiches of different materials, and studying how Ohm's law changes as the strength of an electric field placed over the material increases. Most problems are investigated using large-scale supercomputers and hundreds of years of computer time. His work has applications to thermoelectric refrigerators and power generators, to superconducting digital electronics, and to fundamental properties of ultracold atoms placed in optical lattices. Freericks' recent research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Civilian Research and Development Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research; he has received supercomputer time from the High Performance Modernization Program of the Department of Defense and from a National Leadership Computing System grant from NASA. Jim Freericks is a Professor of Physics in the Georgetown College. He also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Physics. He has completed over one hundred publications including the book Transport in Multilayered Nanostructures: The Dynamical Mean-field Theory Approach (Imperial College Press, 2006), and articles in “Physical Review Letters,” “Applied Physics Letters,” and “Reviews of Modern Physics.”