Alessio Zaccone
Alessio Zaccone (born 7 September 1981, Alessandria) is an Italian physicist. Career and research. After a PhD at ETH Zurich, he held faculty positions at Technical University Munich, University of Cambridge and at the Physics Department of the University of Milan. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge. Zaccone contributed to various areas of condensed matter physics. He is known for his work on the atomic theory of elasticity and viscoelasticity of amorphous solids, in particular for having developed the microscopic theory of elasticity of random sphere packings and elastic random networks. With he  developed the Krausser-Samwer-Zaccone equation for the viscosity of liquids. With Eugene Terentjev he developed a molecular-level theory of the glass transition based on thermoelasticity, which provides the molecular-level derivation of the Flory-Fox equation for the glass transition temperature of polymers. He is also known for having developed, in his PhD thesis, the extension of DLVO theory that describes the stability of colloidal systems in fluid dynamic conditions based on a new solution (developed using the method of matched asymptotic expansions) to the Smoluchowski convection-diffusion equation. The predictions of the theory have been extensively verified  experimentally by various research groups. Also in his PhD thesis, he developed a formula for the shear modulus of colloidal nanomaterials, which has been confirmed experimentally in great detail. In 2020 he discovered and mathematically predicted that the low-frequency shear modulus of confined liquids scales with inverse cubic power of the confinement size. In 2017 he was listed as one of the 37 most influential researchers worldwide (with less than 10–12 years of independent career) by the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research published by the American Chemical Society. In 2020 he was listed among the Emerging Leaders by the  Journal of Physics published by the Institute of Physics. As of August 2020, he has published well over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, h-index=30. In January 2022 he proposed an exact solution for the random close packing problem in 2D and 3D, which is part of the Hilbert's Problems (18th). For a long time, scientists believed that a statistical solution to this problem was impossible given the complexity of the many-body interactions among the many spheres that repel at contact. Instead, this solution has produced values in good agreement with experimental data in both 3D and  2D. Furthermore, the method opens up new avenues for our understanding of complex physical systems dominated by randomness, from the structure-property relation in liquids and glasses .