Prof. Ron Lifshitz

Profile

I earned my Ph.D. in Physics at Cornell University in 1995 under the mentorship of Prof. David Mermin. I was then a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology until 1999, after which I joined the School of Physics & Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, where I teach and conduct theoretical research in the fields of quasicrystals, nanomechanical systems and nonlinear dynamics.

I have held visiting faculty appointments at Caltech, the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics and the University of Stuttgart, the National Taipei University of Technology, and currently in the UK, at the Universities of Leeds and Liverpool. I am past Chair of the Commission on Aperiodic Crystals of the International Union of Crystallography, am current Chair of the Advisory Board of the International Conferences on Quasicrystals. Until recently, I chaired the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at Tel Aviv University. I am the recipient of the Olschwang Prize in Physics of the Israel Science Foundation, and the Jean-Marie Dubois Award in Quasicrystals, and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015. I am a 5-time recipient of the Tel Aviv University Rector Prize for excellence in teaching.

Research interests

I am a theoretical physicist working on a range of topics in two separate fields: Quasicrystals and Nanomechanics. My work on quasicrystals in the last decade is mainly concerned with unlocking the secret to their thermodynamic stability—especially in the context of soft condensed matter—and using it to control their self-assembly via pair-potential design.

In addition, I study the fundamentals of aperiodic long-range order and its effect on physical properties, currently focusing on the puzzling nature of single-electron quantum wave-functions in quasicrystals. In the field of nanomechanics my studies range from the mesoscopic physics of phonons in confined geometries and their interaction with electrons, the classical dynamics of coupled nonlinear nanomechanical resonators and oscillators, and the quantum-mechanical behavior of human-made nanoscale devices, with an emphasis on nonlinear quantum dynamics.