Three months after The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) named NREL's Research Fellow, Alex Zunger, as the recipient of its year 2001 John Bardeen Award, the President of the American Physical Society (APS) declared Zunger as the winner of its year 2001 Rahman prize. This award is given annually to a single person "to recognize outstanding achievement in computational physics research." The citation to Zunger's award reads:
"For his pioneering work on the computational basis for first-principles electronic structure theory of solids."
This award, centering on a different aspect of Zunger's work than the Bardeen Award, focuses on Zunger's development of first-principles methodologies for predicting properties of solids. These include: (i) The early development of first-principles LDA atomic pseudopotentials [Topiol, Zunger, Ratner, Chem. Phys. Lett. 49, 367 (1977) and Zunger and Cohen, Phys. Rev. B 18 5449 (1978)]; (ii) the pseudopotential total energy and force methods [Ihm, Zunger and Cohen, J. Phys. C 12, 4409 (1979); (iii) the strategy of simultaneous relaxation of atomic positions and electronic charge densities, a precursor to Car-Parrinello [Bendt and Zunger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 50 , 1684 (1983)]; (iv) accurate exchange-correlation functional; (v) the self-interaction correction (Perdew and Zunger, Phys. Rev. B 23, 5048 (1981)], and; (vi) mixed-basis cluster expansion for prediction of ground state crystal structures and the temperature-composition phase-diagram of alloys. Other areas of interest of A. Zunger include photovoltaic materials, spontaneous ordering in solids (the subject of the year 2001 Bardeen Award) and quantum nanostructures and. Zunger's research at NREL is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Science, Division of Materials Science, and by DOE's Photovoltaic Program.
Previous recipients of this award include Ken Wilson (1993), John Dawson (1994), Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello (1995), Steve Louie (1996), Donald Weingarten (1997), David Ceperley (1998), Michael Klein (1999) and Michael Creutz (2000).
This award will be presented to A. Zunger at the annual APS meeting in Boston, MA, on June 25, 2001. The announcement will appear in the March 2001 issues of the APS News.
For information on NREL's Solid State Theory Group see: http://www.sst.nrel.gov