Preface

Correlations among several many-body systems manifest themselves at various scales especially under extreme conditions. In collecting invited contributions for this special volume, we especially had in mind many-electron systems both in solids and in molecules or clusters, under high pressure or low temperature, and especially in solids or molecular systems with reduced dimensionality. These in fact embrace the main research interests of Prof. Renato Pucci, whose 70th birthday we would hereby like to celebrate. Professor Pucci started his career immediately after he graduated in physics from the University of Catania (Italy) in 1968, where he eventually became full professor of structure of matter (condensed matter theory) in 1990. During his long and fruitful career, he enjoyed a constant collaboration with Prof. Norman H. March (Oxford University, UK), with regular visits of Prof. Pucci to Oxford first and of Prof. March to Catania later. Professor Pucci also collaborated with several other distinguished scientists, including Profs. R.G. Parr (North Carolina University, USA), F. Flores (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain), and L.S. Brizhik (Ukrainian Academy of Science, Kiev, Ukraine). He is the author of more than 150 papers on several peer-reviewed international journals and serves as referee for numerous national and international journals, such as the Physical Review and the Physical Review Letters, and the Journal of Chemical Physics. Professor Pucci is quite well known within the high-pressure scientific community. After organizing two Archimedes Workshops on high-pressure science, he chaired the European High Pressure Research Group (EHPRG) meeting in 1998 and the Joint International Conference of the International Association for the Advancement of High Pressure Science and Technology (AIRAPT) and of the EHPRG in 2007. He was also scientific secretary of the national congress of the Italian Physical Society (SIF) in the International Year of Physics 2005. For both the EHPRG and the AIRAPT, he has been the member of the respective scientific committees for several terms.