Jan Korringa

Jan Korringa
Born	31 March 1915 Heemstede
Died	9 October 2015 (aged 100) Laguna Beach
Occupation	Dutch physicist

Jan Korringa (31 March 1915, – 9 October 2015) was a Dutch-American physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics.

Education and career

Korringa received his bachelor's degree from Delft University of Technology and then his PhD there in 1942 under Bram van Heel with thesis Onderzoekingen op het gebied algebraïsche optiek (Essays in the area of algebraic optics).^[1] He became in 1946 an associate professor at the University of Leiden and in 1952 a full professor at Ohio State University. For the academic year 1962–1963 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.^[2]

In a now-famous 1947 paper,^[3] Korringa showed how his multiple-scattering theory (MST) could be used to find the energy as a function of wavevector for electrons in a periodic solid. In 1954 Nobel laureate Walter Kohn and Norman Rostoker, who went on to have a successful career in nuclear physics, derived the same equations from a different starting point. What are now known as the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker (KKR) band-theory equations are used around the world. ...Korringa realized that his equations could help calculate the electronic states of nonperiodic solids for which Bloch’s theorem does not hold. In 1958 he published an approach, now called the average t-matrix approximation, for calculating the electronic states in random substitutional alloys. ... Korringa’s MST is the basis for numerous theoretical developments, including the locally self-consistent multiple-scattering theory developed by Stocks and Yang Wang; when run on massively parallel supercomputers, it can be used to simulate the electronic and magnetic states of any ordered or disordered solid with models comprising tens of thousands of atoms.^[4]

References

1. Jan Korringa at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
2. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Jan Korringa". gf.org. Retrieved 2016-04-03.
3. J. Korringa (1947). "On the calculation of the energy of a Bloch wave in a metal". Physica XIII (6–7): 392–400. Bibcode:1947Phy....13..392K. doi:10.1016/0031-8914(47)90013-x.
4. Faulkner, J. Sam; Stocks, G. Malcolm (April 2016). "Obituary. Jan Korringa". Physics Today: p. 70.