Salvatore Torquato is an American theoretical scientist born in Falerna, Italy. His research work has impacted a variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, applied and pure mathematics, materials science, engineering, and biological physics. He is the Lewis Bernard Professor of Natural Sciences in the department of chemistry and Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University. He has been a senior faculty fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, an enterprise dedicated to exploring frontiers across the theoretical natural sciences. He is also an associated faculty member in three departments or programs at Princeton University: physics, applied and computational mathematics, and mechanical and aerospace engineering. On multiple occasions, he was a member of the schools of mathematics and natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
Research accomplishments
Torquato's research work is centered in statistical mechanics and soft condensed matter theory. A common theme of Torquato’s research work is the search for unifying and rigorous principles to elucidate a broad range of physical phenomena. Often his work has challenged or overturned conventional wisdom, which led to resurgence of various fields or new research directions. Indeed, the impact of his work has extended well beyond the physical sciences, including the biological sciences, discrete geometry and number theory. Currently, his published work has been cited over 46,650 times and his h-index is 113 according to his Google Scholar page.
Torquato has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the randomness of condensed phases of matter through the identification of sensitive order metrics. He is one of the world's experts on packing problems, including pioneering the notion of the "maximally random jammed" state of particle packings, identifying a Kepler-like conjecture for the densest packings of nonspherical particles, and providing strong theoretical evidence that the densest sphere packings in high dimensions (a problem of importance in digital communications) are counterintuitively disordered, not ordered as in our three-dimensional world. He has devised the premier algorithm to reconstruct microstructures of random media. Torquato formulated the first comprehensive cellular automaton model of cancer growth. He has made seminal contributions to the study of random heterogeneous materials, including writing the highly acclaimed treatise on this subject called "Random Heterogeneous Materials." He is one of the world's authorities on "materials by design" using optimization techniques, including "inverse" statistical mechanics. More recently he introduced a new exotic state of matter called "disordered hyperuniformity", which is intermediate between a crystal and liquid. These states of matter are endowed with novel physical properties. A recent study has uncovered that the prime numbers in certain large intervals possess unanticipated order across length scales and represent the first example of a new class of many-particle systems with pure point diffraction patterns, which are called effectively limit-periodic.
Random heterogeneous media
Torquato is a world authority on the theory of random heterogeneous media. This area dates back to the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh and Einstein, and has important ramifications in the physical and biological sciences. Random media abound in nature and synthetic situations, and include composites, thin films, colloids, packed beds, foams, microemulsions, blood, bone, animal and plant tissue, sintered materials, and sandstones. The effective transport, mechanical and electromagnetic properties are determined by the ensemble-averaged fields that satisfy the governing partial differential equations. Thus, they depend, in a complex manner, upon the random microstructure of the material via correlation functions, including those that characterize clustering and percolation.