Prof. Nihat Berker als Humboldt-Preistraeger zu Gast am Lehrstuhl T37 (Prof. Netz)
Prof. Nihat Berker als Humboldt-Preistraeger zu Gast am Lehrstuhl T37 (Prof. Netz)
Prof. A. Nihat Berker of Sabancı University, Istanbul, will be visiting the research group of Prof. Roland R. Netz, in connection with his Humboldt Research Award, in January – February 2009
Prof. Berker’s research is in statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. With the group of Prof. Netz, he shall work on the non-equilibrium statistical mechanics of nano-constrained systems. Previously, Prof. Berker has worked on magnetic systems with frozen disorder, including spin glasses in which he has derived the chaotic behavior of correlations under scale change, scale-free and small-world networks, strongly correlated electronic systems, liquid crystals, and surface systems. One of his latest works using local renormalization-group techniques, with his student C.N. Kaplan and Dr. M. Hinczewski of our department, has yielded the distribution of local magnetizations and local spin-glass order parameters, revealing intricate “tulip” patterns pictured below. Prof. Berker has the post of Vice President at Sabanci University and is a Council Member of the Academy of Sciences of Turkey. Before returning to Turkey 10 years ago, he was a faculty member in the Physics Department of MIT, where he is now Emeritus Professor.