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Nikolay Victorovich Prokof'ev is a Russian-American physicist known for his works on supersolidity and strongly correlated systems and pioneering numerical approaches.

Biography

He received his MSc in physics in 1982 from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, Moscow, Russia. In 1987, he received his PhD in theoretical physics from Kurchatov Institute (Moscow), under the supervision of Yuri Kagan, where he worked from 1984 to 1999. In 1999, he became a professor at the physics department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Research

He is recognised for his research on strongly correlated states in electronic and bosonic systems, critical phenomena, and quantum Monte Carlo methods.

His and his coauthors have made key contributions to the theory of supersolids includes the theory of superfluidity of crystalline defects, such as the appearance of superfluidity on grain boundaries and in dislocation cores (reviewed in ) and superglass state. He co-invented, with Boris Svistunov and Igor Tupitsyn of the widely used Worm Monte-Carlo algorithm. With Boris Svistunov he invented the Diagrammatic Monte-Carlo method which is stochastic summation of Feynman diagrammatic series which is free from the Numerical sign problem.

He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society,  for "pioneering contributions to theories of dissipative quantum dynamics and for innovative Monte Carlo approaches to quantum and classical studies of critical phenomena."

He coauthored the book on modern theory of superfluidity.

References

1. "Nikolai Prokof'ev | Physics Department | UMass Amherst". Physics Department at UMass Amherst. Retrieved 2018-09-30.
2. "Nikolay Prokofiev - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
3. Prokof’ev, Nikolay; Svistunov, Boris (2005-04-20). "Supersolid State of Matter". Physical Review Letters. 94 (15): 155302. arXiv:cond-mat/0409472. Bibcode:2005PhRvL..94o5302P. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.155302. PMID 15904155. S2CID 45498667.
4. "Superfluid States of Matter". CRC Press. 2015-04-15. Retrieved 2018-10-04.
5. Boninsegni, Massimo; Prokof’ev, Nikolay; Svistunov, Boris (2006-03-16). "Superglass Phase of $^{4}\mathrm{He}$". Physical Review Letters. 96 (10): 105301. arXiv:cond-mat/0512103. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.105301. PMID 16605751. S2CID 118886810.
6. "slides" (PDF).
7. Rossi, R.; Prokof'ev, N.; Svistunov, B.; Van Houcke, K.; Werner, F. (2017-04-01). "Polynomial complexity despite the fermionic sign". EPL (Europhysics Letters). 118 (1): 10004. arXiv:1703.10141. Bibcode:2017EL....11810004R. doi:10.1209/0295-5075/118/10004. ISSN 0295-5075. S2CID 17929942.
8. "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
9. "Superfluid States in Nature and the Laboratory", Superfluid States of Matter, CRC Press, 2015-04-15, pp. 523–544, doi:10.1201/b18346-21, ISBN 9781439802755

• 20th-century American physicists
• Russian physicists
• Scientists from Moscow
• Fellows of the American Physical Society
• University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
• Russian emigrants to the United States
• Living people