Stefano Fantoni

Stefano Fantoni (born 4 June 1945) is an Italian theoretical physicist, now retired from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (SISSA), still working in the fields of nuclear physics and low temperature physics.

The common denominator of his research was to go beyond the mean-field models in solving the so-called many-body theory that occurs in quantum Bose or/and Fermi systems, characterized by the presence of strong correlations among their components. In the seventies he has been the author, together with Sergio Rosati, of the Power Series cluster theory for strongly interacting fermions, known as FR cluster expansion, and later, of the Fermion Hyper Netted Chain (FHNC) integral equations to compute the FR expansion terms at all orders. Such theories have opened up the modern many-body studies on strongly interacting Fermi systems, such as nuclear matter and Quantum fluids. It is due to him and to V. R. Pandharipande and O. Benhar, the extension at all perturbative orders of the so-called Correlated Basis Function (CBF) theory, originally developed by E. Feenberg, and the proof of its renormalizability, as well as the first realistic calculation of the one-body Green's Function and the Response functions of Nuclear matter, largely used to explain the experimental results of electron and neutrino scattering on heavy nuclei. Also of great importance are his studies done together with Kevin Schmidt on Quantum Monte Carlo methods for nuclear systems, and particularly the development of the Auxiliary Field Diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC) method, heavily used in nuclear and neutron matter calculations. Provided by Wikipedia