Brief research summary over last 5 years / academic profile

Mikhail Katsnelson’s work covers the whole field of condensed matter theory. His main achievements are in magnetism, strongly correlated systems and graphene. His theory of exchange interactions in molecules and crystals is now commonly used in first-principle calculations of real materials. He was one of the pioneers in electronic structure calculations with strong electron correlations taken into account. After the discovery of graphene, he became one of the world-leading experts in this field. Main current research programs:

Graphene and other two-dimensional materials

Katsnelson made essential contributions to experimental work on graphene, starting from a seminal paper (Nature 2005) where massless Dirac fermions were first discovered. Andre Geim wrote in his Nobel lecture 2010: “Our rapid progress would be impossible without Misha Katsnelson who provided us with all the theoretical help an experimentalist can only dream of”. The main achievements were the discovery of Klein tunneling (Nature Phys. 2006), the discovery of intrinsic ripples (Nature 2007; Nature Mat. 2007), and the concept of pseudomagnetic gauge fields created by deformation that lies at the basis of “strain engineering” (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2006, 2008; Nature Phys. 2010). In recent years, Katsnelson has participated in several novel top-level achievements in this field, including visualization of Berry phase in graphene (Nature 2019), permeation of hydrogen through graphene membrane (Nature 2020), single-atom-memory at the surface of black phosphorus (2018), magnon spectra of one-dimensional ferromagnets CrBr 3 and CrI 3 (Nature Electron. 2018, Nano Lett. 2020), discovery of unusually strong electron-phonon interaction in single-layer InSe (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2019) and many others.

Magnetism and strongly correlated systems

Katsnelson developed a quantitative theory of angle-resolved photoemission spectra for transition metals and of exotic Kondo effects for magnetic clusters on metallic surfaces (numerous publications in Phys. Rev. Lett.). He has also developed new techniques of “dual fermions” and “dual bosons” to treat nonlocal correlation effects (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2009; Ann. Phys. 2012; Phys. Rev. B 2014; Phys. Rev. B 2016). Applications include plasmons in strongly correlated systems (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2014), the prediction of flat band formation in 2D systems near Van Hove singularities (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2014) and rigorous theory of exchange interactions in strongly correlated systems (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2018). Other important results are a generalization of his theory of non-equilibrium exchange interactions (Ann. Phys. 2013) and a new method to calculate Dzialoshinskii – Moriya interactions (Phys. Rev. B 2010; Nature Phys. 2014). He actively collaborates with the groups of Rasing (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2012, Nature Commun. 2015), Hussey (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2016, Nature Commun. 2017, Nature Physics 2018), and Khajetoorians (Nano Lett. 2017, Nature Commun. 2018).