Gene F. Mazenko, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute of the University of Chicago, passed away on 7 July 2024 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was preceded in death by his wife of 54 years, Judy, in December 2023.
Gene was born in Coalport, Pennsylvania, on 5 July 1945, and moved to Los Angeles when he was 8 years old. In high school, he excelled equally at academics, where he was a member of the Math Club, and at sports: baseball (third base) and football (quarterback), becoming captain of both. He received his BS from Stanford University in 1967 and his PhD from MIT in 1971, and he held postdocs at Brandeis University, Harvard University, MIT, and Stanford from 1971–74. He joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago in December 1974, a time when the condensed matter physics group was rebuilding. He was welcomed by John Hertz, Stuart Solin, Paul Horn, Stuart Rice, and others, and was joined soon after by Kathy Levin and Sidney Nagel. Gene was instrumental in the following years in recruiting Tom Rosenbaum, Albert Lichaber, Tom Witten, and Leo Kadanoff. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2015.
As a graduate student at MIT, Mazenko worked under acoustician K. Uno Ingard, but his passion was sparked by a quantum statistical mechanics class taught by Paul Martin at Harvard. Working almost entirely on his own (consulting Ingard and Martin only after his calculations were finished), Gene applied those modern field theoretic techniques to the attenuation of sound in a dilute gas, greatly impressing Martin, who became an unofficial adviser and lifelong mentor.
His initial landmark work was the fully renormalized kinetic theory (FRKT) of dense fluids, an approach for calculating time-dependent correlation functions using memory functions to capture collective behavior and mode–mode coupling. This work provided microscopic models for cooperative dynamics in liquids and for nonlocal and nonlinear effects seen in certain dense fluids. FRKT had immediate success describing neutron scattering experiments at Argonne National Laboratory.
In addition to investigating new applications of FRKT, including studies of Fermi liquids and plasmas with Harvey Gould and Oriol T. Valls, Mazenko collaborated with Shang-Keng Ma to do the first renormalization group treatment of the critical dynamics of isotropic ferromagnets. He later did corresponding work on isotropic antiferromagnets in collaboration with postdocs Robert Freedman and Michael J. Nolan, and he spent much of the next several years finishing a general formalism for real-space renormalization-group treatments of dynamic critical phenomena (with Nolan, Valls, Jorge E. Hirsch, James Luscombe, and Enis Oguz).
During the 1980s, Mazenko developed an interest in the “breakdown of hydrodynamics.” With Sriram Ramaswamy and John Toner, he predicted that coupling to the Nambu–Goldstone modes of smectic liquid crystals would cause an exceptionally strong divergence of viscosities in the low-frequency limit. This was followed by work with Shankar P. Das (and Ramaswamy and Toner) of a nonlinear fluctuating hydrodynamic (NFH) theory of the glass transition in fluids. Later work with Das extended NFH to obtain microscopic self-consistent equations crucial for the feedback mechanism of mode-coupling theory. Their analysis demonstrated that a full account of the nonlinearities in the NFH equations for a compressible liquid (and the fluctuation-dissipation constraints that follow) does not support a sharp ergodic–nonergodic transition, and, instead, predicted a crossover of the dynamics. Research into mode-coupling and NFH continued with Bongsoo Kim, including significant efforts to reconcile the scaling seen in glass experiments with that predicted by theory.
Mazenko also had a first-principles understanding of the scaling laws governing domain growth. His work (with Fong Liu) to develop an auxiliary vector field whose value is the separation to the nearest defect remains a guiding influence on the field. He extended that work to higher order corrections and application to vortex annihilation (with Robert Wickham). Mazenko also developed large-N approaches to the time-dependent Ginzburg–Landau model (with Marco Zannetti) and performed definitive studies of the coarsening of stripe order (with Hai Qian).
Mazenko returned to the study of memory functions for dense liquids towards the end of his career. Beginning in 2008, Mazenko developed a new fundamental theory of strongly interacting classical particle systems based on a self-consistent perturbation theory. This work (with Das, David McCowan, and Paul Spyridis) provided a practical framework for treating glassy systems and allowed calculations of ergodic-to-nonergodic transition dynamics that match experimental observations. The theory reproduced the salient features of earlier mode-coupling theories, but it is derived from first principles and has a clear mechanism for making systematic corrections.
Beyond his intellectual successes, Gene was also respected for his talents as a scientific leader and administrator. He served as the director of the James Franck Institute (1986–92), special assistant to the provost for science (1992–93), and assistant provost (1993–95). He wrote several graduate-level textbooks—Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics (2000), Fluctuations, Order and Defects (2006), and Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics (2008)—and also edited (with Geoffrey Grinstein) Directions in Condensed Matter Physics: Memorial Volume in Honor of Shang-Keng Ma (1986).
Mazenko's research can be characterized as ambitious, formal, and powerful. He had a great instinct for knowing where the exciting problems were and favored developing techniques and difficult calculations rather than quick hand-waving arguments. He was motivated by interesting phenomena and had a keen intuition for how physical systems worked. What set him apart was his ability to keep focused through the sometimes messy and complex mathematical maneuvers that were needed to give his intuition a structure that could be used to do calculations.
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