Martin Quack is a German physical chemist and spectroscopist; he is a professor at ETH Zürich.
Life and work
Martin Quack started his chemistry studies at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1966 and continued as fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service between 1969 and 1970 at the University of Grenoble and then he obtained his diploma as chemist in 1971 at the University of Göttingen. In 1972 he moved to the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where he obtained his doctoral degree in 1975 working with Jürgen Troe on the statistical theory of unimolecular and complex forming bimolecular reactions. In 1973 he attended a quantum chemistry summer school organized by Per-Olov Löwdin in Uppsala. From 1976 to 1977 he stayed as Max Kade fellow with William H. Miller at UC Berkeley. Subsequently, he moved to Göttingen and finished his habilitation there in 1978. He was appointed full professor at the University of Bonn in 1982. Since 1983 he has been professor of physical chemistry at ETH Zürich, where he served as head of the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry in 1986/1987, 1991/1992 and 2006/2007. In 2005 he was Miller Visiting Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2011 and 2012 he served as President of the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry. His research group investigates the quantum dynamics and kinetics of molecules both theoretically and experimentally, with special emphasis on the dynamics of tunneling and parity violation in chiral molecules. Most notably their theoretical work has shown that the effect of parity violation is between one and two orders of magnitude larger than anticipated from earlier calculations and can be detected, in principle, as an energy difference between the ground states of enantiomers of chiral molecules by precision experiments of molecular physics, using the fundamentally new kinetic process of the time evolution of parity in isolated molecules.) He is an editor of the "Handbook of High Resolution Spectroscopy".
Awards and Honours
1982 Nernst-Haber-Bodenstein prize of the Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry
