Peter Hänggi (born November 29, 1950) is a theoretical physicist from Switzerland, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Augsburg. He is best known for his original works on Brownian motion and the Brownian motor concept, stochastic resonance and dissipative systems (classical and quantum mechanical). Other topics include, driven quantum tunneling, such as the discovery of coherent destruction of tunneling (CDT), phononics, relativistic statistical mechanics and the foundations of classical and quantum thermodynamics.

Career

He studied physics and was awarded B.Sc (1972), M.Sc (1974) and Ph.D. degrees (1977) at the University of Basel. He was a Postgraduate Research Associate at the University of California, San Diego (1979–80), Assistant Professor of Physics, Polytechnic Institute of New York, New York (1980–1983), Associate Professor, Polytechnic Institute of New York, New York (1983–1987) and full professor at the University of Augsburg (1986 to present).

Hänggi's law

The following statement is attributed as Hänggi's law: "The more trivial your research, the more people will read it and agree." It is labeled as a kind of Murphy's law and it was first seen in Arthur Bloch's work. However, the attribute's relation to Professor Hänggi's research is not clear. Corollaries:

Honors and awards

He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1988 "for distinguished contributions to nonlinear statistical physics and reaction rate theory and for elucidating the influence of non-Markovian memory effects and dissipative tunneling in equilibrium and non equilibrium systems". In 2003, he was elected to membership in the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, on October 14 2005 elected membership in American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) for distinguished contributions to the field of reaction rate theory and stochastic resonance and for discovering coherent destruction of tunneling and Brownian motors, October 2007 elected membership in the Academia Europaea (AE), 2014 elected membership in European Academy of Sciences (EURASC) and in 2015 elected foreign honorary membership in the Academia Română. He has been honored with over 10 doctor honorary causa (Dr. h.c.) degrees. Peter Hänggi is a recipient of a number of scientific awards including

Notable review papers