George F. Bertsch Professor of Physics Senior Fellow, Institute for Nuclear Theory Editor, Reviews of Modern Physics, 1996-2005

Physics INT

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Tel. 206-543-2895
Fax. 206-685-9829
E-mail: bertsch@uw.edu
Postal: Dept. of Physics
Box 351560
Univ. of Washington
Seattle WA 98195
On-campus directions

My research expertise is in the application of quantum many-particle theory to physical systems. These include nuclear structure and reactions; and electronic excitations of molecules, solids, and nanoscale electronic systems.

Most recently, my major goal is to develop systematic theory of nuclear structure based on mean field theory. The publication of "Structure of even-even nuclei" is representative of this work. It is a global study of the spectroscopy of even-even nuclei, based on a Hamiltonian containing no parameters beyond those of a well-known nuclear interaction. The theory is applicable to many of the properties that are measured experimentally, and it performs better than other global theories on a number of them. Graphs showing the performance of the theory on various properties are displayed below. The next step in this ongoing project is to extend the theory to odd-A nuclei. This work also requires development of the numerical tools to apply mean field theory and its extensions to strongly correlated systems.

A second program of research is the application of time-dependent density functional theory to a wide variety of physical observables and phenomena. Density functional theory is now the computational paradigm for quantum mechanical calculations of energies and other properties of molecules and condensed matter. The time-dependent theory applies particularly to electronic excitations and interactions with the electromagnetic field. With my collaborator Kazuhiro Yabana, we have developed a real-time formalism and computation code to apply the theory to many observables. Most recently, we have published the first theoretical calculations of coherent phonon production by intense laser pulses. We are now completing work to apply the theory to the breakdown of insulators by intense electromagnetic fields. Here the computation requires modeling the physics both on the atomic scale for the electrons and on the laboratory scale for the propagation of the waves.

My work has been recognized by the American Physical Society, which awarded me the Bonner Prize in 2004 for my "many varied contributions to nuclear structure and reaction theory, which have guided and illuminated experiments for four decades." My publications have a citation rank of 64 on the Hirsch index.

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