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| Name |
Kardar, Mehran |
| Location
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Primary Field
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Applied Physical Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Physics |
 Election Citation
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Kardar has transformed our understanding of interfaces in motion. The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang stochastic equation for interface dynamics predicts surface morphology, correlations and scaling laws in agreement with experiment. Kardar has made other fundamental contributions to statistical physics, including theories of fluctuating membranes, the thermal Casimir effect and models of active particles. |
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Research Interests
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Statistical physics is concerned with myriad phenomena emerging from collective behaviors of very large numbers of underlying entities. The tools of the discipline, matured over the last century, successfully account for the diverse phases of matter and transitions between them. However, these methods have traditionally been restricted to systems in equilibrium. A focus of my research has been on phenomena emerging in systems out of equilibrium, extending and generalizing methods of statistical physics when possible. A notable result has been in the context of fluctuations of a growing interface. As consequence of the ubiquity of non-equilibrium phenomena, our work has touched upon many areas from applied mathematics (stochastic differential equations) to material science (so-called active matter) to immunology (vaccination strategies). |
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