Anthony Jacko (1985-2022): condensed matter theorist

I was very sad when last week I learned of the death of Anthony Jacko, a former member of the Condensed Matter Theory group at UQ. He was only 36 years old, having been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the end of last year.

Jacko's funeral was this week. Family and friends spoke warmly of his intelligence, humour, faithfulness, passion for life, and endearing quirkiness. There were both tears and laughs.

I will say something here about his scientific contributions, though at times like this what we achieve professionally does not really seem that important.

I first met Jacko as an undergraduate at UQ when he took an advanced undergraduate condensed physics course with me in 2006. That year he did an undergraduate honours (fourth year) project with Ben Powell and John Fjaerestad, on the Kadowaki-Woods ratio. This work eventually led to a Nature Physics paper, that I discussed in this blog post.

In 2007 I was quite happy when Jacko decided to do a Ph.D. with me and Ben Powell. We tried to come up with simple effective Hamiltonians for organometallic complexes that are used in organic LEDs and solar cells. Although we made some progress, I think the questions we tried to address have still not been answered definitively. The most progress has subsequently been made by Ben Powell.

For a postdoc, Jacko moved to Frankfurt to work with Roser Valenti and Harald Jeschke (now at Okayama University). I was really impressed how Jacko learned how to do reliable DFT-based electronic structure calculations and to use Wannier orbitals to extract tight-binding model parameters. Jacko brought this expertise back to Ben Powell's group at UQ, where he worked from 2013 to 2018.

During that time Jacko co-authored a string of really nice papers that inspired me to write multiple blog posts, such as those below. Looking back over that work I see how careful, solid, and systematic it is. Basically, good science, that we do not see enough of these days.

The broad issue is as follows. Understanding strong electron correlations in complex molecular materials requires effective Hamiltonians that are a realistic representation of the essential physics and chemistry. Sometimes next-nearest-neighbour interactions and subtleties in crystal structure really do matter. Other times they do not. The methods used by Jacko provided a robust way of doing this.

How robust are your tight-binding model parameters?

Common challenges with constructing diabatic states and tight-binding models

Quantum spin liquid on the hyper-honeycomb lattice

Springy stringy molecular crystals

Faculty hope that former students will come to their funeral. We also hope that we won't have to attend the funeral of any of our students. It is very sad.

An endowment is being created at The University of Queensland, to fund an undergraduate physics prize that will be awarded each year in honour of Jacko.

My condolences to Jacko's partner, Alana, and to family and friends.