Dr Chris Hooley

Dr Chris Hooley

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Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 3171
Email
cah19@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Teaching

Chris's main current teaching activities are: PH3081 (Maths for Physicists); PH5014/SUPAEPS (Interacting Electrons in Solids); and SUPARFN (Response Functions).  The first of these is an undergraduate course at St Andrews; the second is shared between St Andrews final-year undergraduates, CM-DTC PhD students, and other PhD students within SUPA; and the third is for PhD students only.  He also co-ordinates the MPhys final-year projects in theoretical physics at St Andrews.

In addition, he was co-creator and inaugural module co-ordinator of the St Andrews interdisciplinary sub-Honours module "Great Ideas 1" (ID1003), and initiated (and still organises) the optional "Advanced Topics in Modern Physics" lecture series at St Andrews.  He is a member of the School's Teaching Committee, and also leads a tutorial group in PH3014 (Transferable Skills for Physicists).

His past teaching activities have also included: PH2012 (Physics 2B: Quantum Physics) (2006-2013); PH3062 (Quantum Mechanics 2).

He has twice been recipient of a St Andrews Students' Association University-wide Teaching Award: for "Teaching at Honours" in 2011, and for "Project Supervisor (Science)" in 2013.

Research areas

Chris Hooley is a Senior Lecturer in theoretical condensed matter physics at St Andrews, and also Operations Director of the Scottish Doctoral Training Centre in Condensed Matter Physics.  His research interests centre on the quantum many-body problem and its applications in the physics of strongly correlated electrons in crystalline solids, cold atomic gases, and nanoscale devices.

His active research topics at the moment are: the use of matrix product states to describe strongly correlated electron systems; vortex-mediated melting in layered systems with competing orders; the effect of the trapping potential on the many-body physics of ultracold atomic gases; the interpretation of partition function zeros at complex temperature; Majorana-paired mean-field states in magnetic systems; relativistic corrections to the electron-electron interaction in metals at low temperatures (with his student Sam Ridgway); and soliton solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell-Dirac equations (with his student Alasdair Leggat, co-supervised with Professor Keith Horne).  He also has research interests in non-equilibrium physics, particularly the out-of-equilibrium Kondo model, and in magnetostrictive effects, including the Invar phenomenon.

PhD supervision

  • Francisco Zuniga Frias
  • Joe Crossley
  • Thomas Sheerin
  • Felipe Arevalo Escobar

Selected publications

 

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