Vita
I am a Research Professor at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid belonging to the Spanish National Reseach Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas).
Aharon Davidson, 1984
My education and first research was in the area of Quantum Field Theory. I did my Ph D Thesis: «Horizontal Axion alternative: A solution to the domain wall problem» in the Weizmann Institute (Israel) under the supervison of Prof. Aharon Davidson to whom I will be always indebted. My thesis disertation touched on the main problems of the time: The strong CP problem, the breakdown of the U(1) Peccei-Quinn symmetry by instantons to Z(n), and the cosmological domain wall problem associated. All these problems have influenced my later carrier.
I did a postdoctoral stay in Princeton University in the String Theory group of Ed Witten 1986-1988 and returned to the National Research Council in Madrid where I worked on 2D gravity Liouville theory in collaboration with J. González. From the string worldsheet we started to turn our interest to physics in lower dimensions, anyon superconductivity, and alike. I «discovered» the Fermi liquid and, in collaboration with José González, Germán Sierra and Miguel Ángel Martín-Delgado, wrote a book on Quantum electron liquids with the the beginner’s daring.
The synthesis of the fullerenes in 1985 and the re-encounter with Paco Guinea, a class mate in the faculty of Physics that specialized in Condensed Matter physics – and who knew already that a single sheet of graphite was described by the Dirac equation -, led us to the fascinating activity of applying Quantum Field Theory techniques to condensed matter problems.
The group at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2006
I spend some years as a tenured assistant professor in the Mathematics Department of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid where I taught mathematics to engineering students. I’ve also taught at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After learning a lot from this teaching, I gained a position in the National Research Council.