Alexander V. Balatsky

Alexander V. Balatsky is an USSR born American physicist, the director of the Institute for Materials Science (IMS) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2011 Balatsky was appointed as a professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at Nordita.

Balatsky obtained his doctoral degree from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. After postdoctoral training and a research assistant professor position at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, he came to Los Alamos National Laboratory as an Oppenheimer Fellow. As an acting chief scientist and as a theory thrust leader he was actively involved in bringing up the Center of Integrated Nanotechnology (CINT) and building an active theory program at CINT. In 2014 Balatsky became a Director of new Institute for Functional Materials at Los Alamos. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003, and Los Alamos Fellow in 2005. In Nov 2011, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow

Balatsky is known for his contributions to the theory of High-temperature superconductivity, and mechanism of superconducting paring known as Spin Fluctuation Theory.

According to this theory, the pairing wave function of the cuprate HTS should have a dx2-y2 symmetry. The same spin fluctuation mechanism is likely responsible for the superconducting pairing in Heavy fermion superconductors and in Fe based superconductors. Balatsky recently worked on anomalous mechanical properties of solid He4 as an alternative explanation of supersolidity seen in torsional oscillator experiments, on theory of Heavy Fermions, and on electronic and structural properties of DNA and Graphene hybrid structures

Balatsky and collaborators predicted the existence of the impurity induced resonances in d-wave superconductors that can serve as markers of unconventional superconductivity, and Impurity-induced states in conventional and unconventional superconductors.

He also proposed the notion of Dirac Materials as a unifying class of materials that exhibit Dirac like excitations.