Meet our WISE Guest Professor Mikhail Katsnelson

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This time, we are delighted to welcome Prof. M.I. Katsnelson from Radboud University, as Guest Professor at Uppsala University. We had the opportunity to sit down with him to discuss his research.

Prof. Katsnelson will be one of the two speakers in the upcoming public GP lecture on November 6, 15:00–16:00, with the talk “From quantum many-body physics to materials and sustainability”. The talk will explore how fundamental quantum mechanical and electrodynamic laws can be applied to understand and predict material properties through approximations like density and Green’s function functionals.

What is your current area of research field?

I am dealing with a broad circle of problems in condensed matter physics and materials science but three subfields should be specially mentioned: (1) two-dimensional materials; (2) magnetism and magnetic materials; (3) strongly correlated materials. In all of these cases, I am very much interested in developing the way from basic and seemingly abstract laws of quantum physics to explanations and predictions of properties of real materials.

What inspired you to become a researcher, and specifically in this field?

This is all due to outstanding teachers which I had in school, in the University and after the University. My scientific tastes were formed under strong influence of many people, first of all, Boris Ishmukhametov, Sergey Vonsovsky and Valentin Vaks. I should especially mention Sergey Vonsovsky who was probably the leading Soviet scientist in the theory of magnetism, and that is why magnetism became my main area. Two-dimensional materials were added much later and partially by accident, thanks to Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov who invited me to join their work on graphene from the very beginning.

How does your work help address the challenges of a sustainable future?

In two-dimensional materials, I was especially strongly involved in studies of graphene, from their very beginning. I participated in many applied works on graphene, including chemical sensors, tunneling transistors, and chemistry of graphene. I believe that the works on hydrogenation of graphene and on penetration of hydrogen through graphene membrane which we still continue have especially serious potential, e.g., for extraction hydrogen from air and hydrogen energetics.

In magnetism, we develop a general approach allowing to compute basic magnetic properties of materials from the laws of quantum mechanics. In combination with contemporary machine learning tools they can be used for screening of the list of possible magnetic materials and for creating novel materials with desired properties, for example for replacing expensive rare earth elements by something more economically favorable, or for the increase of Curie temperature of magnetic semiconductors.

We are also working hardly on optical properties of two- and three-dimensional materials, including very difficult case of strongly correlated systems. This can be important for the development of such fields as photonics and plasmonics, with a perspective of information processing with much lower energy consumption than in traditional electronics.

Brief Bio

Professor Katsnelson graduated from Ural State University (now part of Ural Federal University) in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), in the Soviet Union, with a specialization in theoretical physics.
After defending his first thesis (PhD) and his second thesis (Doctor of Sciences — the Soviet two-step qualification system), he became a group leader at the Institute of Metal Physics and a professor at Ural State University, both in Ekaterinburg.
In the 1990s, he was also extensively involved in international scientific collaborations, spending time in the USA, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
From 2001 to 2004, he was a visiting researcher at Uppsala University, and since 2004 he has been a professor and head of the Condensed Matter Theory group at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He has received several awards, including the Spinoza Prize (the highest scientific distinction in the Netherlands) and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics.
He is a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion, an honorary doctor of Uppsala University, and an elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala, and Academia Europaea.