Alex Zunger - Research Fellow and Team Leader

phone: 303-384-6672
email: alex_zunger@nrel.gov
At NREL since 1978

Alex Zunger received his Ph.D. from Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1976, where he worked with Prof. Joshua Jortner and Binyamin Englman on quantum theory of molecular solids. He moved to the United States in 1976, doing his postdoctoral research at the Physics Dept. of Northwestern University in 1976–1977 (with A.J. Freeman). He then received the IBM Fellowship, which he spent at the Physics Dept. of U.C. Berkeley (working with M.L. Cohen). When the U.S. government established a national laboratory in Colorado in 1978, Dr. Zunger was asked to establish and head the Solid State Theory effort there, a position he still holds today. Concomitantly, Dr. Zunger became a Prof. of Physics (adjoint) at the Physics Dept. at the University of Colorado, Boulder, until 1986. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), he was appointed in 1984 as Principal Scientist and in 1991 as a Research Fellow.

Dr. Zunger's research field is condensed matter theory of real materials. He developed in 1977 the first-principles density functional pseudopotentials. In 1978, he co-developed the momentum space total energy method. In 1981, he developed with John Perdew the now most widely used exchange and correlation energy functional and the self-interaction correction. In 1983, he developed a novel theoretical method for simultaneous relaxation of atomic positions and charge densities in self-consistent LDA calculations. Recently, he developed methods for calculating the electronic properties of semiconductor quantum nanostructures.

Selected Publications

1. He, L.X., Bester, G., and Zunger, A. "Prediction of an excitonic ground state in InAs/InSb quantum dots," Physical Review Letters 94 (2005).
2. Kent, P.R.C., and Zunger, A., "Evolution of III-V nitride alloy electronic structure: The localized to delocalized transition," Physical Review Letters 86, 2613–2616 (2001).
3. Kim, K., and Zunger, A., "Spatial correlations in GaInAsN alloys and their effects on band-gap enhancement and electron localization," Physical Review Letters 86, 2609–2612 (2001).
4. Franceschetti, A., and Zunger, A., "The inverse hand-structure problem of finding an atomic configuration with given electronic properties," Nature 402, 60–63 (1999).
5. Wang, L.W., and Zunger, A., "Electronic-Structure Pseudopotential Calculations of Large (Approximate-to-1000 Atoms) Si Quantum Dots, Journal of Physical Chemistry 98, 2158–2165 (1994).
6. Wang, L.W., and Zunger, A., "Dielectric-Constants of Silicon Quantum Dots," Physical Review Letters 73, 1039–1042 (1994).
7. Perdew, J.P., and Zunger, A., "Self-Interaction Correction to Density-Functional Approximations for Many-Electron Systems," Physical Review B 23, 5048–5079 (1981).
8. Ihm, J., Zunger, A., and Cohen, M.L., "Momentum-Space Formalism for the Total Energy of Solids," Journal of Physics C-Solid State Physics 12, 4409–4422 (1979).

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