Thomas Maurice Rice

Thomas Maurice Rice, professor emeritus at ETH Zurich, fellow of the Royal Society, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences, passed away on 18 July 2024 at the age of 85.

Maurice Rice was born on 26 January 1939 in Dundalk, Ireland. His undergraduate studies in physics at University College, Dublin, were followed by his PhD at the University of Cambridge under the guidance of Volker Heine. At Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, Maurice first encountered Phil Anderson, in a meeting that ignited his enduring interest in condensed-matter physics and led to many fruitful interactions and collaborations in later years.

Following his PhD, Maurice Rice undertook postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, in Walter Kohn’s group. In 1966, he joined the theory group at Bell Labs in New Jersey, eventually becoming its group leader. The collaborative and intellectually stimulating environment at Bell Labs, where experts on virtually every field could be found just down the hall, profoundly influenced Maurice’s approach to science. During this period, he again met Anderson and also collaborated with many other colleagues, including Bill Brinkman, Bert Halperin, and Patrick Lee.

After many fruitful years at Bell Labs, Maurice Rice in 1982 was appointed full professor at ETH Zurich, where he enjoyed mentoring students and young researchers until his retirement in 2004 and well beyond. His friendly and casual demeanor made him highly approachable, and he had the ability to explain complicated concepts in simple physical terms. This style of approaching physics would influence several generations of young physicists throughout his career.

Maurice Rice made many influential contributions to condensed-matter physics. Initially, he studied effects of electron interactions in metals and low-dimensional superconductivity. His time at Bell Labs shaped his scientific style, emphasizing close collaborations with experimentalists. He developed deep theoretical concepts to explain new experimental data and shaped future research directions, producing classic works on excitonic insulators, electron-hole liquids, and charge/spin density waves. His pioneering work with Brinkman on the metal–insulator transition clarified charge localization, and the Brinkman–Rice process remains relevant today.

In Switzerland, Maurice, together with Hans-Ruedi Ott, played a crucial role in establishing ETH Zurich as a center for heavy fermion and unconventional superconductivity research. His seminal works with Kazuo Ueda on heavy fermion physics and superconducting symmetry classification became foundational in the field.

The discovery of cuprate high-temperature superconductors by Georg Bednorz and Karl-Alex Müller at IBM Rüschlikon, near Zurich, marked a turning point in Maurice’s research focus. The field let him apply his expertise, significantly advancing its progress. His most famous work, with Fuchun Zhang, identified the Zhang–Rice singlet as key in hole-doped copper oxides, providing a microscopic foundation for Anderson’s t-J model and RVB theory. Expanding on that, Maurice, with Claudius Gros and Bob Joynt, found that d-wave Cooper pairs were the most stable—an early insight into pairing symmetry, later confirmed by many experiments, some inspired by Maurice’s own proposals.

Maurice was passionate about exploring how Anderson’s RVB concept could explain the pseudogap phase in doped cuprates. His work in that area spanned concepts from ladder systems, incorporating Umklapp scattering and interladder tunneling, culminating in the Yang-Rice-Zhang (YRZ) theory. The powerful model of the pseudogap phase, with Kaiyu Yang and Zhang, was developed while Maurice was a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong, mentoring students and advancing his research there for several years starting in 2005.

After his retirement, Maurice took advantage of the proximity of his second home on Long Island to Brookhaven National Laboratory. There he spent his summers as a member of the condensed-matter physics group at the laboratory, working with many physicists on the application of the YRZ ansatz to analysis of the photoemission spectra produced by Peter Johnson’s ARPES group and to studies of other phenomena related to the underdoped cuprates.

Maurice left a lasting legacy in condensed-matter physics in Switzerland. His passionate teaching and research fostered a new school of modern theoretical physics, emphasizing close collaboration between theorists and experimentalists, a hallmark of his Bell Labs experience. His students at ETH continue his pioneering spirit and dedication to research and education.

Maurice’s outstanding contributions earned him the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics and John Bardeen Prizes, honorary Royal Irish Academy membership, election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Ireland in Dublin.

A brilliant mentor and colleague, his enthusiasm and insight inspired all who worked with him. He will be deeply missed.

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