Former Students Gather for Symposium in Memory of Richard Ferrell

In November, from November 16-17, 2007, a symposium entitled Strongly Interacting Systems: Past, Present and Future, was held in memory of Richard A. Ferrell at the Max Planck Institute, Dresden, Germany. Dr. Ferrell was a theorist with contributions in several areas, including statistical and condensed matter physics. He joined UMD Physics in 1953, and was an active member of the campus and the nearby community until his death in 2005.

Pictured below, are former students of Dr. Ferrell’s (From left: John Quinn, Jay Bhattacharjee, Peter Fulde and Alan Luther). They are among the most distinguished PhD recipients of the UMD Physics Department.

In 2006, Dr. Quinn, ’58, was awarded the Physics Distinguished Alumni Award.  He is the former Chancellor of the University of Tennessee. His thesis work, involving one of the first field theoretic evaluations of electron self-energy by expanding in the dynamically screened Coulomb interaction, is a classic which is still cited.

Dr. Bahattacharjee, ’79, is currently a Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bangalore. He first worked with Dr. Ferrell as a graduate student, and continued that collaboration until Dr. Ferrell’s final paper.

Dr. Fulde, ’63, is currently the head of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. His thesis addressed superconductors with a strong spin exchange field. The Ferrell-Fulde phase was recently observed in CeCoIn 5.

Dr. Luther, ’67, Professor at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in Denmark, won the Buckley Prize in 2001 (with Vic Emery) for  his “fundamental contribution to the theory of interacting electrons in one dimension."