UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Marcos Rigol, professor of physics and co-hire of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, has been selected to receive the title of distinguished professor of physics in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research and service to the Penn State community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the dean of the Eberly College of Science.
Rigol is one of 10 Penn State faculty members to be named a distinguished professor in 2025.
“Marcos is an outstanding physicist, mentor and communicator, widely regarded as a leading theoretical quantum physicist,” said Mauricio Terrones, George A. and Margaret M. Downsbrough Head of the Department of Physics at Penn State. “He has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of quantum mechanics, particularly in the area of quantum thermalization, and his many scientific publications have been collectively cited more than 24,000 times.”
Rigol is a theoretical physicist whose research centers on understanding the dynamic behavior of quantum many-body systems — systems made up of a large number of particles interacting with each other through the laws of quantum mechanics. His work falls into two categories: theoretical advances that push the frontiers of the field by revealing new insights into complex problems and the theoretical interpretation of experiments carried out in some of the world’s leading cold-atom laboratories.
Rigol is best known for his work on thermalization — how particles eventually reach an equilibrium temperature through their interactions — in quantum systems. His landmark paper from 2008 revealed new insights into complex quantum systems that are isolated from their environment — such conditions are ideal for the components of quantum computers to store information — and suggests that even these perfectly isolated systems will thermalize under their own quantum dynamics. The paper, which reveals how thermalization could impact the performance of quantum devices, has been cited more than 3,500 times. He has also identified quantum systems that deviate from the thermalization paradigm and has helped to develop a new experimental technique to probe quantum fluids.
Rigol is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society (APS) and he previously served as the chair of the APS Division of Computational Physics. He received the Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Physical Sciences from Penn State in 2019 and was recognized as a 2019 Highly Cited Researcher in the field of physics by the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Group. Rigol was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 and received the Young Scientist Prize from the International union of Pure and Applied Physics in 2011. He has published more than 180 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals, including Nature, Science, Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A, B, E and X.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2013, Rigol was an assistant, then associate professor, at Georgetown University from 2008 to 2012. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 2007 to 2008, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, from 2006 to 2007, and at the University of California, Davis, from 2004 to 2006. He earned a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2004, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in nuclear physics from the Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Technology, Havana, Cuba, in 2000 and 1999, respectively.