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 The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

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

supersolid In condensed matter physics, a supersolid is a spatially ordered material with superfluid properties. In the case of helium-4, it has been conjectured since the 1960s that it might be possible to create a supersolid. Starting from 2017, a defin ...

s 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 Boris Vladimirovich Svistunov (russian: Борис Владимирович Свистунов; born October 22, 1959) is a Russian-American physicist specialised in the condensed matter physics. He received his MSc in physics in 1983 from Moscow ...

and Igor Tupitsyn of the widely used Worm Monte-Carlo algorithm. With

he invented the Diagrammatic Monte-Carlo method which is stochastic summation of Feynman diagrammatic series which is free from the

Numerical sign problem In applied mathematics, the numerical sign problem is the problem of numerically evaluating the integral of a highly oscillatory function of a large number of variables. Numerical methods fail because of the near-cancellation of the positive and neg ...

. He is an elected Fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

, 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

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prokof'ev, Nikolay 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 Year of birth missing (living people)