Anthony James Leggett

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Anthony James Leggett bigraphy, stories - British-American physicist

Anthony James Leggett : biography

26 March 1938 –

Sir Anthony James Leggett, KBE, FRS (born 26 March 1938), also Tony Leggett, has been a Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1983.

Professor Leggett is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Career

Leggett spent the period August 1964 – August 1965 as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and David Pines and his colleagues (John Bardeen, Gordon Baym, Leo Kadanoff and others) provided a fertile environment. He then spent a year in the group of Professor Takeo Matsubara at Kyoto University in Japan.

After one more postdoctoral year which he spent in "roving" mode, spending time at Oxford, Harvard and Illinois, in the autumn of 1967 he took up a lectureship at the University of Sussex, where he was to spend the next fifteen years of his career.

In early 1982 he accepted an offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) of the MacArthur Chair with which the university had recently been endowed. As he had already committed himself to an eight-month stay at Cornell in early 1983, he finally arrived in Urbana in the early fall of that year, and has been there ever since.

Leggett’s own research interests shifted away from superfluid 3He since around 1980; he worked inter alia on the low-temperature properties of glasses, high-temperature superconductivity, the [Bose-Einstein Condensate] (BEC) atomic gases and above all on the theory of experiments to test whether the formation of quantum mechanics will continue to describe the physical world as we push it up from the atomic level towards that of everyday life.

In 2007 he accepted a position at the University of Waterloo Canada. For the next five years, he will spend at least two months a year on campus at the Institute for Quantum Computing.

He currently serves as the chief scientist at the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory, a research institute hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Education

He won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in December 1954 and entered the University the following year with the intention of reading the degree technically known as Literae Humaniores (classics).

He completed a second undergraduate degree, this time in physics at Merton College. One person who was willing to overlook his unorthodox credentials was Dirk ter Haar, then a reader in theoretical physics and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford; so he signed up for research under his supervision. As with all ter Haar’s students in that period, the tentatively assigned thesis topic was "Some Problems in the Theory of Many-Body Systems", which left a considerable degree of latitude.

Dirk took a great interest in the personal welfare of his students and their families, and was meticulous in making sure they received adequate support; indeed, he encouraged Leggett to apply for a Prize Fellowship at Magdalen, which he held from 1963 to 1967. In the end Leggett’s thesis consisted of studies of two somewhat disconnected problems in the general area of liquid helium, one on higher-order phonon interaction processes in superfluid 4He and the other on the properties of dilute solutions of 4He in normal liquid 3He (a system which unfortunately turned out to be much less experimentally accessible than the other side of the phase diagram, dilute solutions of 3He in 4He). Oxford University awarded Leggett an Honorary DLitt in June 2005.

Research

His research focuses on cuprate superconductivity, conceptual issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics, superfluidity in highly degenerate atomic gases, low temperature properties of amorphous solids and topological quantum computation.