The international prize “Prof. Luigi Tartufari " for the Physical-Chemical area, among the most prestigious awards of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei has been won by Pasquale Calabrese, professor of statistical physics at SISSA, for the Physical-Chemical area. The prize, desired by the widow Tartufari in memory of her jurist husband, is awarded every year for four rotating topics. For 2020 they have been mathematics, physics-chemistry, geosciences and biological sciences.
Here is the motivation:
The Commission considers Prof. PASQUALE CALABRESE highly deserving of the award of the "Luigi Tartufari" 2020. Pasquale Calabrese is universally known as a researcher of great stature, and international renown. His field of work has covered and covers, through a scientific production as qualified as diversified, various fields of theoretical physics, condensed matter and statistical physics. He contributed fundamentally to the physics of low-dimensional extended quantum systems in equilibrium and out of equilibrium, with particular emphasis on precisely resonable models and their description in theory of fields. He showed an uncommon competence in the field of classical non-equilibrium systems such as polymer systems and growth phenomena (directed polymer and Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation) applying methods borrowed from field theory and integrable models (Bethe Ansatz). Pasquale Calabrese is one of the leading international experts in statistical quantum mechanics, a leading field both for conceptual and application problems to which he has made important contributions. See for example the 2016 review on J. Stat. Mech. by two protagonists of the field Bernard and Doyon, in which 12 of Calabrese's works are cited. It is an area that requires considerable mathematical skills that Calabrese has shown to possess fully. The many topics he dealt with include entanglement entropy and quantum Generalized hydrodynamics, among others. This exceptional vitality and scientific originality has had and is having repercussions in experimental fields such as the physics of ultra-cold atoms and quantum technologies, and in other theoretical fields including the extension of standard numerical methods to many bodies systems, of the Density Matrix Renormalisation Group type, from which thanks to its contributions it becomes now possible to extract important theoretical information in conformal field theories (for example the central charge, and the structural factors.). In addition, some of his predictions concerning the evolution of correlation functions (the so-called "cone light effect") and entanglement in quantum systems have been confirmed in refined experiments with ultra-cold atoms by the most important international groups. The young age of Calabrese - born in 1976 - and his great talent as an educator as well as a scientist make him a promising school leader, worthy of the best tradition of the Tartufari prize.
Calabrese's work focuses on entanglement entropy in extended quantum systems and on his relationship with field theories. Before arriving in Trieste, Calabrese was a postdoctoral fellow in Oxford and at the University of Amsterdam, then a researcher at the University of Pisa. He was invited as visiting professor to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in February 2009 and to the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris for three months in 2011.
At SISSA, from 2016 to 2019 Calabrese was coordinator of the PhD course in statistical physics, and thanks to his contacts with the International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) he became a reference point for students arriving from all over the world.
SISSA professor Erio Tosatti, who endorsed Calabrese's nomination at the Academy Awards Commission, commented that Pasquale Calabrese deserved the award in recognition of «both for his international value and scientific and educational potential, and for his contribution to the excellence of the research in our country».
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