Dieter Vollhardt (born September 8, 1951) is a German physicist and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Augsburg.
Vollhardt is one of the founders of the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) for strongly correlated materials such as transition metals (e.g. iron or vanadium) and their oxides, i.e. materials with electrons in open d- and f-shells.
This leads to a multitude of phenomena such as the Mott-Hubbard metal insulator transition.
In 1989 Vollhardt and his doctoral student Walter Metzner introduced electronic models with local interaction (Hubbard model) on a lattice with infinitely many nearest neighbors,[1] which Gabriel Kotliar and Antoine Georges[2] then developed into the DMFT.
The combination of the DMFT with material-specific approaches, such as the "Local Density Approximation" (LDA) to the density functional theory, led to a new computational scheme, often referred to as LDA+DMFT, for the investigation of strongly correlated materials.