Antoine Georges

Antoine Georges graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in 1983, and joined Ecole Normale Superieure (Laboratoire de Physique Théorique) for graduate studies. After initial steps (and a few publications) in high-energy theory, he worked for several years on disordered systems, most notably spin-glasses and non-Brownian diffusion in disordered environments (he is the author of a review article on this subject, in collaboration with J.P. Bouchaud). He defended his PhD thesis at LPT-ENS in 1988 (the committee was chaired by Pierre Gilles de Gennes).

At this stage, Antoine was ready for a change and wanted to learn about strongly-correlated electron systems (it was soon after the discovery of high-temperature superconductors), and was offered in 1989 a postdoc at Princeton University with Phil Anderson and Daniel Fisher. He worked there from 1989 to 1991.

In the fall of 1990, he started collaborating with Gabriel Kotliar, who had recently joined Rutgers University. Together they developed the mapping onto a self-consistent quantum impurity model, which is at the heart of the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory approach to strongly correlated fermion systems. He pursued research in condensed matter physics of strongly correlated systems ever since his return to France, in the fall of 1991.

Among the research achievements that he is particularly happy about are: the DMFT-based theory of the Mott transition (with Werner Krauth, and in close connection with the Rutgers group of G.Kotliar), the exact solution of the 2-impurity 2-channel Kondo problem (with Anirvan Sengupta), an investigation of the 2-impurity Kondo effect in double quantum dots (with Yigal Meir), a large-N study of quantum Heisenberg spin-glasses and doped spin liquids (with Olivier Parcollet and Subir Sachdev), a collaboration with Patrice Limelette and the group of Denis Jerome which resulted in the first experimental study of the critical behaviour at the Mott critical endpoint, several studies of correlated materials combining DMFT with ab-initio density functional methods, including a proposal for merging GW and DMFT into a first-principle scheme for strongly correlated materials (with Silke Biermann and Ferdi Aryasetiawan), and work on cooling and spectroscopy in ultra-cold atom systems.

Recently, Antoine's research has focused mostly on the physics of copper-oxide high-temperature superconductors, iron pnictides, and the emerging field of condensed matter physics with ultra-cold atoms in optical lattices.

In 2003, he moved to Ecole Polytechnique, where he set up a research group on strongly correlated systems in the Centre de Physique Théorique. In 2009, was awarded the chair of Condensed Matter Physics at Collège de France.

Distinctions:

1991, Anatole et Suzanne Abragam Prize of the Academie des Sciences

2004, Prix Dargelos

2007, Médaille d'Argent du CNRS.

2006, with Gabriel Kotliar, Walter Metzner, Dieter Vollhardt, awarded the Condensed Matter Europhysics Prize (European Physical Society and Agilent Technologies) for the development and application of Dynamical Mean-Field Theory''.