Herbert Wagner (physicist)
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Herbert Wagner (born 6 April 1935) is a German theoretical physicist, who mainly works in statistical mechanics. He is a professor emeritus of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Biography[edit]
Wagner was one of the last students of German theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner Werner Heisenberg, with whom he worked on magnetism.[1]
As a postdoc at Cornell University, he and David Mermin (and independently of Pierre Hohenberg) proved a "no-go theorem", otherwise known as the Mermin–Wagner theorem. The theorem states that continuous symmetries cannot be spontaneously broken at finite temperature in systems with sufficiently short-range interactions in dimensions .[2]
Wagner is the academic father of a generation of statistical physicists. Many of his students and junior collaborators now occupy chairs in German universities, including Hans Werner Diehl (Essen), Siegfried Dietrich (Wuppertal, then Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung Stuttgart), Gerhard Gompper (Forschungszentrum Jülich), Reinhard Lipowsky (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Berlin), Hartmut Löwen (Düsseldorf), Klaus Mecke (Erlangen), and Udo Seifert (Stuttgart).
Awards[edit]
In 1992, Wagner was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Essen (now University of Duisburg-Essen).[3] In 2016 he received the Max Planck Medal for his fundamental works on the statistical physics of low-dimensional systems.[4]
References[edit]
- ^ W. Heisenberg, H. Wagner, K. Yamazaki: "Magnons in a model with antiferromagnetic properties", Il Nuovo Cimento 59, 377-391 (1969), doi:10.1007/BF02755024.
- ^ N.D. Mermin, H. Wagner: "Absence of Ferromagnetism or Antiferromagnetism in One- or Two-Dimensional Isotropic Heisenberg Models", Phys. Rev. Lett. 17, 1133–1136 (1966).
- ^ Ehrenpromotionen in der Theoretischen Physik an der Universität [Duisburg-]Essen
- ^ "Preisträger Max Planck nach Jahren". Archived from the original on 2016-07-30. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
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