BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN HUBBARD
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born Oct. 27, 1931, London , England.
died Nov. 27, 1980, San Jose, CA., U.S.
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BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN HUBBARD
died Nov. 27, 1980, San Jose, CA., U.S. |
1. J. Hubbard, Electron Correlations in Narrow Energy Bands. Proc.Roy.Soc. A 276, 238 (1963).
John Hubbard studied physics at London University, Imperial College of Science and Technology.
Promotor of his B.Sc. thesis (1953) and Ph.D. thesis (1958) was Prof. Stanley Raimes from the Department of Mathematics, Imperial College, London,
who wrote two very readable textbooks:
Wave Mechanics Electrons in Metals, North-Holland, 1961;
Many-Electron Theory, North-Holland, 1972.
John Hubbard took his Ph.D., in 1958 on a thesis
devoted to the Description of Collective Motions in Terms of Many-Body Perturbation Theory
with Applications to the Electrons in Metals and Plasma.
John Hubbard published his famous article "Calculation of Partition Functions" in Phys. Rev. Lett., 5 (1959) N 2, pp.77-78.
The famous Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation has been refined and reformulated for the calculation of the grand partition
functions of some many-body systems.
He took the position of a researcher at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell in
the Theoretical Physics Division, headed by W. Marshall in 1955.
He took the position of the Head of the Theoretical Physics Group at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell in
the Theoretical Physics Division in 1961.
During the years from 1963 to 1966 he formulated his famous Hubbard Model in series of 6 papers
in the Proceedings of the Royal Society:
CITED by 4052 (on 06.2011)
2. J. Hubbard, Electron Correlations in Narrow Energy Bands.II. The Degenerate Band Case.
Proc.Roy.Soc. A 277, 237 (1964).
3. J. Hubbard, Electron Correlations in Narrow Energy Bands.III. An Improved Solution. Proc.Roy.Soc. A 281, 41 (1964).
CITED by 1502 (on 06.2011)
4. J. Hubbard, Electron Correlations in Narrow Energy Bands.IV. The Atomic Representation. Proc.Roy.Soc. A 285, 542 (1965).
5. J. Hubbard, Electron Correlations in Narrow Energy Bands.V. A Perturbation Expansion About the Atomic Limit.
Proc.Roy.Soc. A 296, 82 (1966).
6. J. Hubbard, Electron Correlations in Narrow Energy Bands.VI. The Connection with Many-body Perturbation Theory.
Proc.Roy.Soc. A 296, 100 (1966).
John Hubbard told the story of the invention of the model in the inteview:
Citation Classic, Number 22, June 2 in 1980.
He worked at Harwell up to 1976.
He moved from Harwell to the IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California at 1976.
During the years from 1976 to 1980 he worked on the problems of magnetism of Iron and Nickel and one-dimensional
conductors.
John Hubbard was not elected by a fellow of the Royal Society and did not received any Honors or Awards.
P.S. This biography was written in 2005 on the basis of the published works of John Hubbard and small pieces of information
from the colleagues. Now the more precise data on John Hubbard biography are available (see text below).
JOHN HUBBARD: THE MAN BEHIND THE MODEL.
Those who knew John Hubbard describe him as
a very shy man – to the point that others, who
did not know him so well, may have perceived
him as somewhat aloof. Born on 27 October
1931, Hubbard was educated first at Hampton
Grammar school and then at Imperial College,
London, where he obtained his PhD in 1958
under Stanley Raimes. Unusually for his time
and social context, he lived with his parents in
Teddington throughout his university education.
At the end of his PhD, Hubbard was recruited
to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in
Harwell, Oxfordshire, by Brian Flowers, who was
then heading the theory division. An anecdote
from this period of Hubbard’s career illustrates
his retiring personality.
While at Imperial,
Hubbard had dealt with the project assigned to
him for his PhD fairly quickly, and had then
looked for a more challenging problem. At the
time, quantum-field-theory methods, particularly
Feynman diagrams, were being applied to
problems in many-body theory. However, it was
difficult to bring the same methods to bear on
the many-electron problem – relevant to
solid-state systems – because the Coulomb
interaction between electrons made quantities
like the total energy diverge.
Hubbard realized that these divergences
could be controlled: the trick was to sum up an
infinite series of a particular class of Feynman
diagrams.
When Hubbard arrived in Harwell, he
mentioned this to Flowers, who wanted to see
the paper. Alas, there was no paper, Hubbard
explained, because when he was about to write
it up he saw an article by other researchers who
had introduced a different method to solve the
same problem. Hubbard had found their
method physically appealing, checked privately
that their results coincided with his, and
concluded there was no need for an additional
publication on the topic. Flowers then issued an
explicit order that Hubbard should publish his
groundbreaking work.
Hubbard’s most famous papers are the series
he wrote on his eponymous model, starting in
1963. He was not the only one working on the
strong-correlations problem: some months
earlier, Takeo Izuyama, working at Nagoya
University, and Duk-Joo Kim and Ryogo Kubo,
at the University of Tokyo, both in Japan, had
argued that a proper description of correlations
in metals with strong electron–electron
interactions could explain the observed
spin-wave spectrum. Martin Gutzwiller, who was
then working at IBM’s research laboratories in
Zurich, had also produced essentially the same
model. Yet it was Hubbard’s calculations that
showed that the model that now bears his name
could in fact describe both the metallic and
insulating behaviour as two extremes of the
same thing. His application of a Green’s function
technique to the model was a template for many
other works in condensed-matter theory, and his
papers from that time contain many crucial
insights, such as the existence of so-called
Hubbard bands that are a main feature of our
current understanding of Mott insulators.
Eventually, Hubbard became the leader of
the solid-state theory group at Harwell, and
Walter Marshall succeeded Flowers as head of
the theory division. Unlike the shy Hubbard,
Marshall, who was also an excellent theorist,
was very proactive in hunting for personnel and
for funding. This was a blessing in disguise for
Hubbard, as Marshall ignored Hubbard’s
reticence completely and kept “parachuting”
postdocs into his group.
Hubbard left the UK for the US in 1976,
following Marshall's promotion to director of the
Atomic Energy Research Establishment and a
subsequent major reform of its facilities in
Harwell. He joined Brown University and the
IBM Laboratories in San Jose, California, where
his research focused on the study of critical
phenomena: phase transitions near which
universal behaviour, independent of material specific
properties, is observed.
He died, aged
just 49, in San Jose on 27 November 1980.
(Main source: Stephen Lovesey, private
communications)
SOURCE:
Jorge Quintanilla and Chris Hooley (2009). "The strong-correlations puzzle". Physics World 22: pp. 32–37.
SEE ALSO THE WIKIPEDIA LINKS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbard_model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hubbard_(physicist)