physics

Thomas Maurice Rice

Thomas Maurice Rice is a physics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Thomas Maurice Rice rather than just read about it. In short: Thomas Maurice Rice (January 26, 1939 – July 18, 2024), known professionally as Maurice Rice, was an Irish theoretical physicist specializing in condensed matter physics. Life Thomas Maurice Rice was born on 26 January 1939 in Dundalk, Ireland.

Key takeaways

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

Reference excerpt

Thomas Maurice Rice (January 26, 1939 – July 18, 2024), known professionally as Maurice Rice, was an Irish theoretical physicist specializing in condensed matter physics.

Life Thomas Maurice Rice was born on 26 January 1939 in Dundalk, Ireland. He 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, Coláiste Rís. 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 (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Rice and his wife, Helen, moved with their family of a son and two daughters from New Jersey to Zürich. Rice retired from teaching in 2004 and is an Emeritus Professor at ETH. Rice died on 18 July 2024, at the age of 85.

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 theorists and experimentalists to analyse the electronic properties of new materials. He joined Bell Labs in the 1960s and 1970s, studying metal-insulator 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 Zurich, 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 switched his research to the challenges posed by these novel superconductors. Cuprates became a major topic in condensed matter physics, as a range of properties in addition to high temperature superconductivity were discovered. Rice and collaborators concentrated on developing a consistent microscopic interpretation of the growing experimental results. One challenge was the microscopic description of the mysterious pseudogap phase, which appears in a range of intermediate hole doping; his research group focused on the role of enhanced Umklapp scattering in a nearly half-filled band as key to the unexpected features.

Brinkman-Rice transition In 1970, Rice and William F. Brinkman helped to characterize the transition from metal to insulator in semiconductors, adding to the Mott-Hubbard approximation. They published a paper addressing the problem of 'the excitation of two electrons to the outside of the Fermi sea', in which they modeled approaching the transition from the uncorrelated metallic state, where each orbital is half-filled.

Awards and honours D.Sc (h.c.) National University of Ireland (1989) Honorary Member, Royal Irish Academy (1988) Member, National Academy of Sciences (1993) Fellow of The Royal Society (2002) EPS Europhysics Prize (1998) John Bardeen Prize (2000)

Selected papers The following papers are Rice's most cited:

Brinkman, W. F.; Rice, T. M. (15 November 1970). "Application of Gutzwiller's Variational Method to the Metal-Insulator Transition". Physical Review B. 2 (10): 4302–4304. Bibcode:1970PhRvB...2.4302B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.2.4302. Brinkman, W. F.; Rice, T. M. (15 February 1973). "Electron-Hole Liquids in Semiconductors". Physical Review B. 7 (4): 1508–1523. Bibcode:1973PhRvB...7.1508B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.7.1508. Zhang, F. C.; Rice, T. M. (1 March 1988). "Effective Hamiltonian for the superconducting Cu oxides". Physical Review B. 37 (7): 3759–3761. Bibcode:1988PhRvB..37.3759Z. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.37.3759. PMID 9944993. Honerkamp, C.; Salmhofer, M.; Furukawa, N.; Rice, T. M. (2 January 2001). "Breakdown of the Landau-Fermi liquid in two dimensions due to umklapp scattering". Physical Review B. 63 (3) 035109. arXiv:cond-mat/9912358. Bibcode:2001PhRvB..63c5109H. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.63.035109. Rice, T M; Yang, Kai-Yu; Zhang, F C (1 January 2012). "A phenomenological theory of the anomalous pseudogap phase in underdoped cuprates". Reports on Progress in Physics. 75 (1) 016502. arXiv:1109.0632. Bibcode:2012RPPh...75a6502R. doi:10.1088/0034-4885/75/1/016502. PMID 22790307. S2CID 15563340.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Thomas Maurice Rice

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Thomas Maurice Rice 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 Thomas Maurice Rice 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 Thomas Maurice Rice 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 Thomas Maurice Rice

In research: Thomas Maurice Rice 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 Thomas Maurice Rice 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: Thomas Maurice Rice is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1939 births, 2024 deaths, 20th-century Irish physicists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Thomas Maurice Rice 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.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “Thomas Maurice Rice” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Thomas Maurice Rice in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Thomas Maurice Rice 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 Thomas Maurice Rice out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Thomas Maurice Rice in simple terms?

Thomas Maurice Rice (January 26, 1939 – July 18, 2024), known professionally as Maurice Rice, was an Irish theoretical physicist specializing in condensed matter physics. Life Thomas Maurice Rice was born on 26 January 1939 in Dundalk, Ireland.

Why does Thomas Maurice Rice 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 Thomas Maurice Rice?

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 Thomas Maurice Rice.