Joe Serene

Joseph W. Serene

Davis Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus
E-mail: serenej@georgetown.edu

Joseph Serene received an A.B. in Physics from Dartmouth College (1969) and a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University (1974), where he studied sound propagation and strong-coupling effects in the superfluid phases of 3He. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, NORDITA Guest Professor at Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University), assistant professor at Stony Brook University, and assistant and associate professor at Yale University. During this time he and his collaborators developed the strong-coupling theory and quasiclassical method for superfluid 3He, in- troduced the first method for numerical analytic continuation of Matsubara-frequency Green’s functions, and established the theory of 3P2 pairing in neutron stars. In 1984 Serene moved to Washington, D.C., where he held positions at the National Science Foundation (1984-1987) and Naval Research Laboratory (1987-1993), and worked on heavy-electron metals and high-temperature superconductors. At NRL he performed some of the first massively-parallel calculations for quantum many-body systems, using the CM-2 and CM-5 Connection Machines. In 1993 Serene joined Georgetown University as Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics. He subsequently served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as a member of the interim Executive of the Georgetown Medical Center, and as Acting Director of Music and Dance. He was named the inaugural holder of the Davis Family Distinguished Professorship in 2004. Prof. Serene left Georgetown in 2006 to become the Treasurer/Publisher of the American Physical Society, where his responsibilities included an annual operating budget of $50M, an endowment of $130M, and subscription, Open Access, and copyright policies of eleven journals publishing over 17,000 peer-reviewed papers per year. In 2014 he returned to teaching and research at Georgetown, as the Davis Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Prof. Serene is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Asso- ciation for the Advancement of Science. He has served as Secretary/Treasurer of the APS Division of Condensed Matter Physics, and was a founder and the first Treasurer of CHORUS, a non-profit organization facilitating public access to published research.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Professor Serene’s current research focusses on strong-coupling contributions to the free energy of superfluid 3He at temperatures below the range of applicability of the Ginzburg-Landau theory, and on strong-coupling corrections to the masses of the Higgs modes of the superfluid order parameter.  

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

1. Phase Diagram for the Attractive Hubbard model in Two Dimensions in a Con- serving Approximation, Phys. Rev. B 66, 014539 (2002). (with J.J. Deisz and D.W. Hess)

2. Quasiparticle Band Structure and Density Functional Theory: Single-Particle Ex- citations and Band Gaps in Lattice Models, Phys. Rev. B 59, 15617 (1999). (with D.W. Hess)

3. Formation of a Coherent Heavy Electron State in the Anderson Lattice Model, Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 129 (1993). (with P.G. McQueen and D.W. Hess)

4. Quasiparticle Properties of the Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model in a Propagator- Renormalized Fluctuation-Exchange Approximation, Phys. Rev. B 44, 3391 (1991). (with D.W. Hess)

5. Stability of Two-Dimensional Fermi Liquids against Pair Fluctuations with Large Total Momentum, Phys. Rev. B 40, 10873 (1989).

6. Current-Density-Functional Theory and the de Haas-van Alphen Effect, Phys. Rev. B 39, 13206 (1989).

7. Theories of Heavy-Electron Systems, Comm. on Cond. Matt. Phys. XII, 99-161 (1986). (with P.A. Lee, T.M. Rice, L.J. Sham, and J.W. Wilkins)

8. The Quasiclassical Approach to Superfluid 3He, Physics Reports 101, No. 4, 221- 311 (1983). (with D. Rainer)

9. Interaction Effects on the Zeeman Splitting of Collective Modes in Superfluid 3He- B, Phys. Rev. Lett. 49, 1183 (1982). (with J.A. Sauls)

10. Magnetic Vortices in a Rotating 3P2 Neutron Superfluid, Phys. Rev. D 25, 967 (1982). (with J.A. Sauls and D.L. Stein)

11. Coupling of Order Parameter Modes with L > 1 to Zero Sound in 3He-B, Phys. Rev. B 23, 4798 (1981). (with J.A. Sauls)

12. 3P2 Pairing Near the Transition Temperature, Phys. Rev. D 17, 1524 (1978). (with J.A. Sauls)

13. Solving the Eliashberg Equations by Means of N-Point Pad´e Approximants, J. Low Temp. Phys. 29, 179 (1977). (with H.J. Vidberg)

14. Free Energy of Superfluid 3He, Phys. Rev. B 13, 4745 (1976). (with D. Rainer)

15. Spin Fluctuation Stabilization of Anisotropic Superfluid States, Phys. Rev. A 10, 2386 (1974). (with W.F. Brinkman and P.W. Anderson)