Collective Phenomena in Condensed Matter Physics : Symposium in Honor of Philippe Nozières

Europe/Paris
Description

Philippe Nozières, who sadly passed away last summer,  was recognized by his peers as a giant in the theory of many-body phenomena in physics. He  spent most of his scientific career in Grenoble, in particular at the ILL, which he joined in 1972. There he led a very active and highly regarded theory group. After his appointment to the chair of statistical physics at  the Collège de France in Paris in 1984, Philippe Nozières kept the  ILL and Grenoble as the base of  his research activities, as head of the ILL Theory Group until his retirement in 2000. He then remained active for more than two decades as a scientific visitor at ILL. During the half-century Philippe Nozières spent at ILL, he  attracted to the ILL some of the world's finest  theoretical physicists, and his deep and insightful ideas have inspired generations of physicists.

Philippe Nozières' outstanding contributions to theoretical physics earned him numerous prestigious awards, among which the Wolf Prize in Physics (1985), and the  Gold Medal of the CNRS (1988). He was elected to the Académie des Sciences (1981) and to the US National Academy of Sciences (1991).

With the Symposium in Honor of Philippe Nozières (19-20 October, 2023), the ILL intends to pay a well-deserved tribute to his outstanding contributions to physics and to the scientific life of the ILL. The symposium will cover some of  the many fields of physics to which Philippe  contributed, featuring  prominent invited speakers with whom he was in close scientific contact.

Click here for a link to Philippe's "carnet noir" with access to two videos on Philippe "Honoris causa - Toronto en 2004" and "Griffin fest - 2011"

  • Thursday, October 19
    • 10:00 AM
      Welcome address
    • 1
      Title TBC
      Speaker: Prof. Duncan Haldane
    • 11:00 AM
      Coffee Break
    • 2
      Spacio-temporal patterns of a dynamical phase transformation to the excitonic insulator state.
      Speaker: Prof. Natasha Kirova
    • 3
      Diffusive Phase transformations in alloys, beyond classical nucleation theory”

      Prof. Yves Bréchet

      Speaker: Prof. Yves Bréchet
    • 1:00 PM
      Lunch
    • 4
      Patterns formation in low dimensional electronic crystals
      Speaker: Prof. Serguei Brazovski
    • 5
      Superfluidity of quantum systems breaking Galilean invariance.
      Speaker: Prof. Sandro Stringari
    • 4:00 PM
      Coffee Break
    • 6
      Beyond X-Rays absorption experiments

      My first contact with Philippe Nozières dates back to 1964. At the time, I was doing my thesis at the ENS Laboratory in Paris and I went to ask him questions about plasmons in semiconductors. Later on, in 1971, I was beginning to take an interest in synchrotron radiation possibilities and I had some questions on his famous paper, written with C. T. De Dominicis on the absorption of X-rays in metals, which had been verified by experiments on Na at the Hamburg synchrotron (DESY) by the R. Haensel’group. At that time, synchrotron radiation experiments were done on synchrotrons, only allowing absorption measurements. It is only in the beginning of the 1970s, with the appearance of stable beams on collision storage rings and later on with the use of undulators, allowing to gain a factor 104 in brightness, that it was possible to develop completely new techniques like Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy, Resonant Inelastic Scattering in soft X-Rays, Inelastic Scattering in hard X-Rays with 1 meV resolution, extremely high pressure Diffraction and Spectroscopy. This allowed to do some experiments that, previously, could be done only with neutrons. I will describe some recent results showing the enormous evolution of these possibilities. From 1992, being DG of the ESRF between 1993 and 2OO2, I interacted more with Philippe, especially after 2004, having offices side by side, which allowed me to see him and ask some stupid questions.

      Speaker: Prof. Yves Petroff
    • 7
      TALK
    • 8
      TALK
  • Friday, October 20
    • 9
      Discussing physics with Philippe
      Speaker: Prof. Bernard Castaing
    • 10
      Understanding the BCS to BEC crossover in granular superconductors: a tribute to Philippe Nozieres.
      Speaker: Prof. Guy Deutscher
    • 11:00 AM
      Coffee Break
    • 11
      Quantum transport and cold atomic gases
      Speaker: Prof. Thierry Giamarchi