| RefNo | EC/1998/43 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Kohn, Walter: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 1997 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to Foreign Membership. Citation typed |
| Citation | Walter Kohn has made outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics.. His first work was to establish the Hulthen-Kohn variational principle to calculate the phase shifts of scattering theory. He developed the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker (KKR) method for calculating band structures. He is one of the pioneers of non-phononic superconductivity. He was the first to analytically continue the electronic band structure of a solid into complex k-space, which later became the basis for the calculation of surface states. The Kohn-Majumdar theorem showed that when an impurity potential is first strong enough to pull a bound state out of a band continuum, the total electron density is a continuous function of the impurity strength, even though the one-electron spectrum shows a discontinuity. This was the first rigorous example of how integrated quantities behave much more locally than the one-electron states.
Kohn and Hohenberg, in 1964, established their theorem which is the basis of modern density functional theory (dft). With his post-doctoral associate Sham, Kohn derived the Kohn-Sham equations which converted dft into a practical method for the determination of electronic structure properties. These equations are all important in computational physics and chemistry today. He applied the method to chemisorption on metal surfaces. More recently Kohn has been extending dft to excited states and time-dependent phenomena. |
| AccessStatus | Closed |
Fellows associated with this archive
| Code | PersonName | Dates |
| NA4691 | Kohn; Walter (1923 - 2016) | 1923 - 2016 |