Tom Imbo, PhD
Associate Professor
Physics
Contact
Building & Room:
2254 SES
Address:
845 West Taylor St.
Office Phone:
Email:
About
Professor Tom Imbo was born and raised on the near west side of Chicago, where he attended UIC as an undergraduate and obtained his bachelor's degree in physics in 1986. In 1988, he received his Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics from the University of Texas at Austin. After spending the 1988-89 academic year at Texas as a postdoctoral fellow, Tom was elected a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows where he remained in residence until Summer 1992 (and is still a member to this day). In Fall 1992, Tom joined the UIC faculty in the Department of Physics, and is currently the Director of the newly-formed “Laboratory for Quantum Theory at the Extremes”. The Laboratory is a think-tank for theoretical physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers to come together and discuss problems of common interest related to extreme physics (the very small, large, fast, cold, hot, dense, etc.). His research focuses on the deep connections between quantum physics, relativity theory, pure mathematics, formal logic, and pure philosophy. Over the years, Tom has procured both Federal and private funding for his work, and has supervised numerous Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. Tom is also a dedicated classroom teacher and has taught over 25 different courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels during his time at UIC, many of which he developed himself. He is constantly pursuing novel interdisciplinary collaborations, and also travels extensively throughout North America giving talks on the conceptual resonances between modern physics and esoteric Chassidic thought.
Selected Publications
•“Shifted l/N Expansions for Energy Eigenvalues of the Schrodinger Equation”, Physical Review D 28, 418-420 (1983) (Rapid Communication)[with U. Sukhatme]
•“Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics and Large-N Expansions”, Physical Review Letters 54, 2184-2187 (1985) [with U. Sukhatme]
•“Inequivalent Quantizations and Fundamentally Perfect Spaces”, Physical Review Letters 60, 481-483 (1988) [with E.C.G. Sudarshan]
•“Identical Particles, Exotic Statistics and Braid Groups”, Physics Letters B 234, 103-107 (1990) [with C. Shah Imbo and E.C.G. Sudarshan]
•“Alice Strings, Magnetic Monopoles and Charge Quantization”, Physical Review Letters 67, 3643-3646 (1991) [with L. Brekke and W. Fischler]
•“Spinning Particles, Braid Groups and Solitons”, Nuclear Physics B 431, 349-377 (1994) [with L. Brekke and M. Dugan]
•“Simple Baryon-Meson Mass Relations from a Logarithmic Interquark Potential”, Physics Letters B 398, 374-380 (1997)
•“Kronecker Products of Sn Characters in Hooks”, Journal of Algebra 246, 356-366 (2001) [with A. Berele]
•“Topologically Alice Strings and Monopoles”, Physical Review D 70, 025005 (2004) [with K. Benson]
•“Indistinguishability”, in Compendium of Quantum Physics (Springer-Verlag, 2009) [with N. Huggett]
•“Discontinuous Quantum Evolutions in the Presence of Closed Time-like Curves”, Physical Review D 81, 087501 (2010) [with R. De Jonghe and K. Frey]
•“Bott Periodicity and Realizations of Chiral Symmetry in Arbitrary Dimensions”, Physics Letters B 718, 603-609 (2012) [with R. De Jonghe and K. Frey]
•“A Generalization of the Functional Calculus of Observables and Notion of Joint Measurability to the Case of Non-commuting Observables”, Journal of Physics A 48, 145302 (2015) [with R. De Jonghe and K. Frey]
Education
BS, Physics (1986), University of Illinois at Chicago
PhD, Physics (1988), University of Texas at Austin