Elihu Abrahams

Elihu Abrahams
Elihu Abrahams
Born	April 3, 1927; UCLA
Doctoral advisor	Charles Kittel

Elihu Abrahams (April 3, 1927 – October 18, 2018) was a theoretical physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics.^[1]^[2]

Abrahams attended

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1956 he became an assistant professor, then an associate professor, and in 1964 a full professor at Rutgers University.^[4]

From 1979 to 1983, he was the president of the Aspen Center for Physics.^[5]

In 1979 Abrahams,

Philip W. Anderson, Donald Licciardello and T.V. Ramakrishnan published the highly influential paper "Scaling Theory of Localization: Absence of Quantum Diffusion in Two Dimensions" in Physical Review Letters 42. Often referred to as the "gang of four paper" in physics circles, the authors proposed new, precise predictions about the behavior of electrons in disordered materials. In 2003 the American Physical Society named it among the top-ten most often cited papers published in the Physical Review.^[6]

Abrahams’ research is in theoretical condensed matter physics. His main interests concern the quantum-mechanical many-body problem in the presence of very strong particle-particle interactions. In this area, he has been using the techniques of quantum statistical mechanics and field theory to investigate the phase transitions and the transport and thermodynamic properties of a number of systems, including high-temperature cuprate superconductors, metals at the threshold of breakdown of Fermi-liquid behavior, iron pnictide superconductors, heavy-fermion metals, localized spins in metals, magnets with unusual spin correlations, and the disordered interacting electron fluid in two dimensions.[7]

In 1964 Abrahams was elected a Fellow of the

2019 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Physics Prize for "pioneering research in the physics of disordered materials and hopping conductivity" together with Alexei L. Efros and Boris I. Shklovskii.^[2]