Roberto Car awarded the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics
Roberto Car, the Ralph W. *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry, has been awarded the international Caterina Tomassoni and Felice Pietro Chisesi Prize for Physics in recognition of outstanding achievements in science.
The prize, announced by the Sapienza University of Rome, is for the year 2025 (due to administrative delays). Two prizes are awarded every one to two years to recognize and encourage achievements in physics: a junior and a senior award. Car has received the latter, which consists of a € 40,000 prize and an invitation to the awards ceremony in Rome.
Car is being honored for co-inventing ab-initio molecular dynamics, which transformed quantum-mechanical simulations of condensed systems; and for further developing Deep Potential molecular dynamics, which extends ab-initio accuracy to vastly larger scales.
The awards committee also cited Car for “decades of seminal applications of quantum simulations, from water and aqueous solutions to complex materials.”
Roberto Car, the Ralph W. *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry.
Car said he was especially gratified by the award because the certificate will be given to him by Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics, and because the Department of Physics at Sapienza has a legacy of excellence that dates back to Enrico Fermi and his collaborators.
The ab-initio molecular dynamics method was invented by Car and Italian physicist Michele Parrinello in 1985 and applied with remarkable success to a variety of problems in condensed matter and chemical physics, materials sciences, and biochemistry. It is now a standard tool for molecular simulation. The method maps the interactions of large numbers of atoms and molecules in motion using quantum mechanics, and can be used to describe and design diverse groups of chemicals and materials. It has often been called a virtual telescope for observing atomic movement.
Car and former Princeton colleague Weinan E further introduced Deep Potential molecular dynamics, a machine learning-based protocol that greatly accelerates ab-initio molecular simulations, and that by capturing the correct physics of the electronic charge distribution in complex materials and across phase transitions led to new discoveries and understanding.
Car, who is also Professor of Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute, is also affiliated with the Department of Physics, the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering. He has been with the Department of Chemistry since 1999.