Jorge E. Hirsch

Jorge E. Hirsch
Professor Jorge E. Hirsch giving a talk
Born	1953 (age 63–64) Buenos Aires, Argentina
Nationality	Argentine American
Fields	Physicist
Thesis	Low-temperature thermodynamic properties of a random anisotropic antiferromagnetic chain (1980)

Jorge Eduardo Hirsch (born 1953) is an Argentine American professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He is known for inventing the h-index in 2005, an index for quantifying a scientist's publication productivity and the basis of several scholar indices.

Hirsch was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Buenos Aires, and a CONICET research fellowship in 1975. A Fulbright Scholarship awarded to him in 1976 took him to the University of Chicago, where he received a Telegdi Prize for the best Candidacy Examination in 1977 and was awarded the Victor J. Andrew Memorial Fellowship in 1978. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1980 and served as a post-doctoral research associate in the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Following this experience, he joined the University of California, San Diego Department of Physics in 1983.

Hirsch's scientific work is involved with understanding collective, large-scale properties of solids, such as superconductivity and ferromagnetism, based on explanations starting from small-scale mechanisms. Hirsch's most significant work would be his attempt to unify theories of superconductivity with his theory of hole superconductivity which suggests pairing of electron holes that would lead to high temperature superconductivity as opposed to pairing of electrons in conventional BCS theory. He believes that there is a single mechanism of superconductivity for all materials that explains the Meissner effect and differs from the conventional mechanism in several fundamental aspects.