Joël Mesot

Key takeaways

Joël Mesot belongs to physics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Joël Mesot to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Joël Mesot from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Joël François Mesot (born 31 August 1964) is a Swiss physicist and academic. He is currently the President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, also known as ETH Zurich.

Biography Mesot was born in Geneva, Switzerland, where he grew up. He studied physics at the ETH Zurich from 1984 to 1989, followed by doctoral studies at the same university as well as at the Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble in France. In 1992, he was awarded a PhD in physics (Dr. sc. nat.) from the ETH Zurich with a thesis on high-temperature superconductors supervised by Albert Furrer. Thereafter he joined the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) as a researcher in the field of neutron scattering. He continued his research at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago to perform angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiments. In 1999, he returned to the PSI, where he was responsible for the laboratory investigating neutron scattering. He became chair of the PSI Research Commission in 2007. In August 2008, he was promoted to head the entire operations at PSI as its director. At the same time, he was named full professor at the ETH Zurich as well as at the EPF Lausanne. He is a member of the ETH Board, also known as the Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, since 2010. Mesot is a trustee of the Marcel Benoist Prize committee. Since January 2019, he is President of the ETH Zurich and, in 2022, was confirmed for a second term by the Swiss Federal Council (2023–2026). Mesot is the first President of the ETH Zurich coming from the French speaking part of Switzerland. He is fluent in French, German and English. Mesot is vice chair of the board of trustees at the ETH Foundation. As president of the ETH Zurich, he is a member of Swissuniversities and the Swiss Innovation Park. In addition, he is part of international boards, such as the Governing Board of the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) in Singapore. Mesot is a member of the Executive Advisory Board of the World.Minds Foundation.

Impact on ETH Zurich As president, Mesot, alongside the other seven executive board members, is responsible for all legal and political matters of the ETH Zurich. Mesot established "rETHink" as a means to improve the university from an organisational point of view. Furthermore, he strengthened the bonds between the ETH Zurich and the French-speaking part of Switzerland, for example by establishing a shared master programme "cyber security" of the ETH Zurich and its sister school the EPF Lausanne. Under his leadership, the new ETH AI Center and Centre for the Origin and Prevalence of Life (COPL) were established in 2020 and 2022, respectively. In collaboration with the Dieter Schwarz Foundation, an additional research center in Heilbronn and the establishment of 20 new professorships over the coming 30 years is planned. In 2023, Mesot established the "Coalition for Green Energy and Storage", a partnership between ETH Zurich, EPFL, and Swiss businesses to establish and produce new environment-friendly technologies.

Awards 1995: IBM prize of the Swiss Physical Society (SPG) for Outstanding Work in Neutron Spectroscopic Studies of the Crystal Field in High-Tc Superconductors. 2002: Latsis prize of the ETH Zurich for his outstanding contribution to the investigation of high-temperature superconductors by neutron scattering and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy.

Publications (Selection) Mesot is author of over 250 published works and a book on strongly correlated materials.

J. Mesot et al.: Neutron Spectroscopic Evidence for Cluster Formation and Percolative Superconductivity in ErBa2Cu3Ox. In: PRL 70 (1993), S. 865. J. C. Campuzano, J. Mesot, et al.: Electronic spectra and their relation to the (pi,pi) collective mode in high-T-c superconductors. In: PRL 83 (1999), S. 3709. J. Mesot, et al.: . In: . Band 83, Nr. 4, 26. Juli 1999, S. 840–843, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.840. A. Furrer, J. Mesot, T. Strässle: . In: . Band 04. World Scientific, 2009, ISBN 978-981-02-4830-7, doi:10.1142/4870. J. Chang, J. Mesot, et al.: . In: . Band 8, Nr. 12, Dezember 2012, S. 871–876, doi:10.1038/nphys2456. B. Q. Lv, J. Mesot, et al.: . In: . Band 11, Nr. 9, September 2015, S. 724–727, doi:10.1038/nphys3426. J. Mesot: . In: Ana Mari Cauce, Yves Flückiger, Bert van der Zwaan (Hrsg.): . Association Glion Colloquium, Geneva 2022, ISBN 978-2-940723-11-9, S. 175–186.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Joël Mesot

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Joël Mesot claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In physics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Joël Mesot before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Joël Mesot ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Joël Mesot

In research: Joël Mesot appears in physics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Joël Mesot in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Joël Mesot is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1964 births, Academic staff of ETH Zurich, Living people, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Joël Mesot outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Joël Mesot in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Joël Mesot means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Joël Mesot out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Joël Mesot in simple terms?

Joël François Mesot (born 31 August 1964) is a Swiss physicist and academic. He is currently the President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, also known as ETH Zurich.

Why does Joël Mesot matter?

Because it connects several physics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Joël Mesot?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Joël Mesot.