Undergraduates
Why does the space shuttle returning to Earth cause two separate sonic booms?
Professor David Pines is the Founding Director-Emeritus of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (a multicampus research program of the University of California), Distinguished Research Professor of Physics at UC Davis, and Research Professor of Physics and Professor Emeritus of Physics and of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His seminal contributions to the theory of many-body systems and to theoretical astrophysics have been recognized by an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews, the 2009 John Bardeen Prize for Superconductivity Theory, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Feenberg Medal, Friemann, Dirac, and Drucker Prizes, and by his election to the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Science Academy [Istanbul] and by Visiting Professorships at the Universite de Paris, University of Leiden, College de France, Caltech, and Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
His current research focuses on the search for the organizing principles responsible for emergent behavior in matter, with particular attention to correlated matter, the study of materials in which unexpectedly new classes of behavior emerge in response to the strong and competing interactions among their elementary constituents. His recent work has focused on emergent behavior in correlated electron superconductors; he has explored ways in which one can get superconductivity without phonons, and the use of the spin-fermion model to examine the role played by magnetic quasiparticle interactions in bringing about superconductivity, pseudogap and quantum critical behavior in the cuprate, heavy electron, and organic superconductors. With his postdocs and collaborators, he is currently working on a two-fluid description of the emergent behavior found in the pseudogap state of underdoped cuprate superconductors and in the Kondo lattice. He continues his interest in the superfluidity of neutron stars as revealed by pulsar glitches, and in the origin of, and interactions between, elementary excitations in the helium liquids.