Thomas Maurice Rice


Thomas Maurice Rice is an Irish theoretical physicist specializing in condensed matter physics.

Life

Rice is the younger brother of structural engineer Peter Rice. He grew up in 52 Castle Road, Dundalk in County Louth with his two siblings. Like his brother, he studied at the local Christian Brothers school. Subsequently he studied physics as an undergraduate at University College Dublin and as a graduate student with Volker Heine at the University of Cambridge. In 1964, he moved to the US and spent two years as a post-doc with Walter Kohn at the University of California, San Diego. Then he joined the technical staff at Bell Labs in 1966, where he stayed until 1981, when he joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland.
Rice and his wife, Helen, moved with their family of a son and two daughters from New Jersey to Zurich. Rice retired from teaching in 2004 and is an Emeritus Professor at ETH.

Career

Rice graduated at a time when the field of condensed matter physics expanded from the study of just simple metals and semiconductors to cover a broad range of compound materials. This led him to collaborate with both theorist and experimentalist colleagues to interpret novel electronic properties of these materials. Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s provided the ideal environment for such collaborations. Rice's contributions covered a range of topics and materials, including metal-insulators transitions in transition metal oxides, electron-hole liquids in optically pumped semiconductors and charge and spin density waves.
In the early 1980s, Rice moved to ETH, a few years before Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller at the nearby IBM laboratories, made their discovery of high temperature superconductivity in layered cuprate compounds. Rice quickly switched his research to the challenges and puzzles posed by these novel and exceptional superconductors. Cuprates rapidly became a major topic in condensed matter physics, as a large range of spectacular properties in addition to high temperature superconductivity were discovered. Rice and his collaborators concentrated on developing a consistent microscopic interpretation of the various novel experimental results. The biggest challenge is the microscopic description of the mysterious pseudogap phase, which appears in a range of intermediate hole doping. Together with a series of talented graduate students and postdocs, he has focused on the role of enhanced Umklapp scattering in a nearly half-filled band as the key to the unexpected features. The physics of cuprates, even after three decades of research, remains very active with many open and controversial questions.

Awards and honours

The following papers are Rice's most cited:
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