1998.  - dr Ivan Bozovic
1999.  - prof. dr Nikola Konjevic
2000.  - dr Miodrag Kulic

Dr. Leonardo Golubovic - 2001 Prize Winner

Prof. dr Leonardo Golubovic was born in Belgrade in 1957. He finished high school in Novi Sad in 1975; in the last grade he won the first prize at the Yugoslav National Physics Contest (1975). In 1980 he graduated at the Technical Physics Department of the School of Electrical Engineering (ETF) of the Belgrade University. As an undergraduate student, he won the Belgrade University October Prize for Scientific Work of Students in 1977. In 1983, he finished graduate studies and defended his M.S. thesis at the Physics Department of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (PMF). At the same school, he defended his Ph. D. Thesis in 1987.  His M.S. and Ph. D. dissertations were both in the area of the theoretical condensed matter physics.

From 1980 to 1987, the winner worked as Research Associate at the Institute for Nuclear Sciences, Vinca. He continued his scientific career in the USA, as a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Physics Department of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1987-89), Research Associate and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Physics Department of the University of California at Los Angeles (1989-91), and  Research Associate at the Department of Chemical Engineering  of the California Institute of Technology- Caltech in Pasadena (1991-92). Since 1992, the winner is a faculty member of the Physics Department at the West Virginia University, as Assistant Professor (1992-98), and  as Associate Professor since 1998. In the academic 1999-2000 year, the winner was appointed as the Visiting Associate Professor and Visiting Scholar at the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics of the Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The winner’s area of research is the statistical physics of condensed matter systems, with emphases on the soft condensed matter (membranes, liquid-crystals, phases of semi-flexible polymers such as DNA) and the dynamics of interfaces (epitaxial growth of crystals). To date, the winner presented his results in 49 published articles in leading international journals and refereed  proceedings serials (14 of his articles are published in the very prestigious Physical Review Letters, 2 of them are review papers), and in 51 presentations at scientific meetings.  His papers have been cited more than 500 times (not counting self-citations and citations by co-authors) in leading international journals in physics and materials science, mostly by leading researchers  in physics. The winner gave 7 invited talks at international conferences, and numerous invited talks at seminars, colloquia, and workshops. He organized and chaired the Symposium “Biomolecules and Supra-Molecular Materials”, at the Centennial Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), Atlanta, March 1999. He was Investigator and/or Program Director on four research projects funded by various US sources, one German funded research project, and he has served as a referee for the National Science Foundation (USA),  Petroleum Research Fund, and seven international journals. To date, two graduate students have obtained their Ph. D’s in physics under his supervision.

Nominated for the physics award  “Marko Jaric” for 2001 were the winner’s scientific results in the areas of the interfacial dynamics (6 papers, cited about 100 times) and of the statistical physics of fluctuating random surfaces, membranes, and complex fluids (some ten papers, cited about 150 times).

The winner won a broad international reputation for his scientific results that are almost regularly at the interfaces between various physics fields. Thus, in the first of the aforementioned areas, the winner and  Prof. Zhen-Gang Wang (Caltech) obtained a fundamental result  in the statistical mechanics of soft condensed matter that is the second of the aforementioned areas. This result is a deep theoretical relationship between the dynamical behavior  of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) growth model  of d-dimensional interfaces on one side, and  the thermodynamic equilibrium properties  of   (d+1)-dimensional smectic A liquid crystals on the other side.  By this relationship, spatial configurations of a two-dimensional smectic fluctuating in its thermodynamic equilibrium state are mapped into the space-time histories of the interfaces of the one-dimensional KPZ model. This discovery provided an exact non-perturbative approach to investigate thermal equilibrium correlations and the anomalous elasticity of two-dimensional smectics A. In particular, this winner’s theory shows that the well known linear Hooke’s law of the classical elasticity breaks down in two-dimensional smectics: In contrast to ordinary elastic solids, two-dimensional smectics respond non-linearly even to weak externally applied forces, with the elastic deformation (strain) given by a power law of externally applied force (stress). A similar cross-disciplinary character have the winner’s most recent investigations (1997-2001) of the pyramidal surface structures occurring in the epitaxial crystal growth. Here, the winner explained the experimental phenomenology  by relating it to the phase ordering phenomena in magnetic systems and metallic alloys (spinodal decomposition).

In the second of the aforementioned areas, the winner has investigated phase transitions in fluid membrane systems, lamellar and sponge phases (such as random microemulsions) of fluid membranes, anomalous elasticity of solid membranes, elasticity and phase transitions of soft amorphous solids, etc.   Thus, the winner and Prof. Tom Lubensky (UPenn)  proposed a novel structural glass state in which the spatial isotropy is spontaneously broken and liquid-crystal like soft phonon modes (undulations) are present. Subsequently, this unusual glassy state has been found in nematic elastomer systems, in recent experiments of Kupfer and Finkelman. Of special interest are the winner’s most recent theoretical investigations (1998-2001) of  a novel quasi-two-dimensional smectic phase that has been revealed in the experiments of Salditt, Raedler, Koltover, and Safinya in 1997, in their x-ray studies of DNA-cationic lipid complexes applied for DNA transfection in novel gene therapy techniques. The winner, in a 1998 Physical Review Letters article co-authored with his wife dr Mirjana Golubovic, has identified this phase as the very first realization of  a new state of matter:  the sliding phase of weakly coupled two-dimensional smectics of DNA molecules sandwiched between lipid membranes, that themselves form a layered three-dimensional lamellar phase. In this layered system, it would be normally expected that the DNA molecules form a crystal like columnar phase with a long range periodic (positional) order stabilized by interactions between DNA molecules in different layers. However, surprisingly, the 1997 experiments have indicated that this system has no long range positional order. The winner’s 1998 theory and his subsequent works have explained these experimental findings by demonstrating that thermal fluctuations can win over the DNA inter-layer interactions and stabilize a novel liquid-crystalline phase with zero shear modulus, i.e., zero elastic resistance for sliding of DNA molecules in different layers over each other. The winner obtained complete phase diagram of these systems that contains this sliding phase as a novel liquid-crystalline state of matter with  zero shear modulus, as well as a nematic and columnar phase of DNA molecules, in accord with subsequent experiments of Artzner, Zantl, Rapp, and Raedler.  

These and other scientific results of  Prof. dr Leonardo Golubovic have inspired subsequent investigations of  numerous  well known researchers worldwide (Pokrovsky, Kardar,  Wolf, Villain, Krug, Raedler, Safinya, Lubensky, Emery, Fradkin, Kivelson, ...)   in their subsequent investigations in both theoretical and experimental physics.