Zachary Fisk

Picture of Zachary Fisk
Distinguished Professor, Physics & Astronomy
School of Physical Sciences
Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 1969
B.A., Harvard University, 1964
Phone: (949) 824-9883
Email: zfisk@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
2186 Frederick Reines Hall
Mail Code: 4575
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Abstract
Prof. Fisk earned his PhD from UC San Diego in 1969 under the supervision of Prof. Bernd T. Matthias and went to Imperial College London to work with Prof. Bryan Coles as a postdoctoral researcher. He returned to UC San Diego where he worked for many years before becoming staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1981. He moved to Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1994 where he remained until 2003. He has spent the following 3 years in UC Davis. He has joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Irvine in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1996.

Prof. Fisk has pioneered the single crystal growth out of molten flux of a large number of rare-earth and actinide intermetallic compounds that have been intensively studied worldwide since their discovery in an effort to understand the complex behavior of strongly interacting electrons at very low temperatures. He was among the first who discovered the first uranium based superconductor, UBe13, soon followed by UPt3. His group is dedicated in pursuing an exciting and ambitious agenda aiming at the discovery and characterization of new materials, which exhibit magnetism, superconductivity and other novel electronic phases. The goal is to find model systems in which simple questions pertaining to the fundamental aspects of the quantum mechanics of a macroscopic number of interacting particles (the so called “quantum many-body problem” can be addressed experimentally. He has a large number of collaborators in US institutions and abroad, whose research ultimately depend on the high quality single crystals his group provides.
Publications
UBe13- An Unconventional Actinide Superconductor, Ott HR, Rudigier H, Fisk Z, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 50, 1595 (1983)

Possibility of Coexistence of Bulk Superconductivity and Spin Fluctuations in UPt3, Stewart GR, Fisk Z, Willis JO, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 52, 679 (1984)

Heavy Electron Metals, Fisk Z, Ott HR, Rice TM, Smith JL, Nature 320, 124 (1986)

Kondo Insulators, Aeppli G, Fisk Z, Comments on Condensed Matter Physics 16, 155 (1992)

Growth of single crystals from metallic fluxes, Canfield PC, Fisk Z, Phil. Mag. B 65, 1117-1123 (1992)
Last updated
09/17/2007