Fabian Kugler receives the Otto Hahn Medal
Fabian Kugler, former doctoral student in the MPQ Theory Division, receives the Otto Hahn Medal awarded by the Max Planck Society. The award was established in 1978 and honours up to 30 young scientists per year for outstanding doctoral research.
Fabian Kugler receives the award for his work on the extension and application of renormalization group methods for the description of strongly correlated electron systems. Due to the current situation, the award ceremony will take place digitally. However, a brochure published by the MPG provides further information on the awardees and their research.
In his PhD, Fabian Kugler dealt with the theoretical concept of the renormalization group that describes how processes with different energies influence one another. The underlying question is: how can complex macroscopic phenomena emerge from simple microscopic processes? Fabian Kugler invented a new formulation of the widely-used functional renormalization group, revolutionizing our understanding therof. His research clarifies the relation of the renormalization groups to traditional diagrammatical methods, resulting in a new quantitative computation strategy, the "multi-loop" functional renormalization group. In addition, Fabian Kugler also worked on the complementary numerical renormalization group and was the first to use it for a description of a realistic material system in order to explain its low-temperature qualities.
Fabian Kugler is a postdoctoral student in the research team led by professor Gabriel Kotliar at the Rutgers University in New Jersey where he works on the description of correlated materials and wants to gain a deeper understanding of correlation physics by applying real-frequency methods.
"Receiving the Otto-Hahn Medal was a great surprise. The award is a good reason to look back at the past with pride, while motivating me for what's ahead," comments Fabian Kugler who has fond memories of his time at MPQ: "The support of the MPQ within the OMPRS-QST was extremely helpful and, among other things, made it possible for me to study abroad."
We wish Fabian Kugler all the best for his future career!