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Encyclopedia > Anthony James Leggett
Anthony J. Leggett
Born March 26, 1938
Camberwell, London, England
Residence USA
Nationality dual UK -US
Field Physicist
Institution University of Sussex
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alma mater Oxford University
Academic advisor Dirk ter Haar
Notable students Amir O. Caldeira
Known for Foundations of quantum mechanics
Superfluidity
Quantum decoherence
Notable prizes Nobel Prize in Physics (2003)
Religion Lapsed Catholic

Sir Anthony James Leggett, KBE, FRS, (born March 26, 1938 in Camberwell, London, England), is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. March 26 is the 85th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (86th in leap years). ... Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Camberwell is a district of London in the London Borough of Southwark. ... This article is about the capital of England and the United Kingdom. ... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: God Save the King/Queen Capital London (de facto) Largest city London Official language(s) English (de facto) Unification    - by Athelstan AD 927  Area    - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK)   50,346 sq mi  Population    - 2006 est. ... Image File history File links Flag_of_the_United_States. ... Image File history File links Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom. ... United States may refer to: Places: United States of America SS United States, the fastest ocean liner ever built. ... Image File history File links Flag_of_the_United_States. ... ... The University of Sussex is an English campus university located near the East Sussex village of Falmer, near Brighton and Hove. ... The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [[UIUC]], known as the U of I, is the flagship campus in the University of Illinois system. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... Amir Ordacgi Caldeira (born 1950 in Rio de Janeiro) is a Brazilian physicist. ... Fig. ... Superfluidity is a phase of matter characterised by the complete absence of viscosity. ... In quantum mechanics, quantum decoherence is the mechanism by which quantum systems interact with their environments to exhibit probabilistically additive behavior - a feature of classical physics - and give the appearance of wavefunction collapse. ... Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) accepting the Nobel Prize for his work on magnetohydrodynamics [1]. List of Nobel Prize laureates in Physics from 1901 to the present day. ... Commanders Badge of the Order of the British Empire (Military division) The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by King George V. The Order includes five classes in civil and military divisions; in decreasing order of seniority... The premises of the Royal Society in London (first four properties only). ... March 26 is the 85th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (86th in leap years). ... Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Camberwell is a district of London in the London Borough of Southwark. ... This article is about the capital of England and the United Kingdom. ... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: God Save the King/Queen Capital London (de facto) Largest city London Official language(s) English (de facto) Unification    - by Athelstan AD 927  Area    - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK)   50,346 sq mi  Population    - 2006 est. ... Physics (from the Greek, (phúsis), nature and (phusiké), knowledge of nature) is the science concerned with the discovery and understanding of the fundamental laws which govern matter, energy, space, and time. ... The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [[UIUC]], known as the U of I, is the flagship campus in the University of Illinois system. ...


He 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. Helium II will creep along surfaces in order to find its own level - after a short while, the levels in the two containers will equalize. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995) accepting the Nobel Prize for his work on magnetohydrodynamics [1]. List of Nobel Prize laureates in Physics from 1901 to the present day. ... A dissipative system (or dissipative structure) is an open system which is operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium within an environment that exchanges energy, matter or entropy. ... Fig. ...


He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences (foreign member), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), the American Physical Society, and American Institute of Physics, and Life Fellow of the Institute of Physics. President Harding and the National Academy of Sciences at the White House, Washington, DC, April 1921 The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine. ... The American Philosophical Society is a discussion group founded as the Junto in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. ... The House of the Academy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... Russian Academy of Sciences: main building Russian Academy of Sciences (Росси́йская Акаде́мия Нау́к) is the national academy of Russia. ... The premises of the Royal Society in London (first four properties only). ... The American Physical Society was founded in 1899 and is the worlds second largest organization of physicists. ... The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is a professional body representing American physicists and publishing physics related journals. ... The Institute of Physics (IOP) is the United Kingdoms professional body for physicists. ...


He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK). He was knighted (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 "for services to physics." He holds dual US/UK citizenship. The Institute of Physics (IOP) is the United Kingdoms professional body for physicists. ... Commanders Badge of the Order of the British Empire (Military division) The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by King George V. The Order includes five classes in civil and military divisions; in decreasing order of seniority...


His current research focuses on cuprate superconductivity, conceptual issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics, and superfluidity in highly degenerate atomic gases A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor (with boiling liquid nitrogen underneath), demonstrating the Meissner effect. ... Fig. ... Superfluidity is a phase of matter characterised by the complete absence of viscosity. ... An atomic gas is a gas of atoms, as opposed to molecules. ...


The International Herald Tribune in an article printed in the 29 December 2005 edition, "New tests of Einstein's 'spooky' reality" referred to his Autumn 2005 debate at a conference in Berkeley, California, with fellow Nobel laureate Norman Ramsey of Harvard. December 29 is the 363rd day of the year (364th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 2 days remaining. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...


Both debated the worth of attempts to change quantum theory. Leggett thought attempts were justified, Ramsey opposed. Leggett believes quantum mechanics may be incomplete because of the quantum measurement problem. The measurement problem is the key set of questions that every interpretation of quantum mechanics must answer. ...


Upbringing and education

He was born in Camberwell, South London, on the 26 March 1938. His father's forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire, though his father broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer; his father would relate how he used to ride with him to buy vegetables at the Covent Garden market in London. His mother's parents were both of Irish stock; her father had emigrated to England and worked as a clerk in the naval dockyard in Chatham. His maternal grandmother, who survived into her eighties, was sent out to domestic service at the age of twelve, she eventually married his grandfather and raised a large family, then in her late sixties emigrated to Australia to join her daughter and son-in-law, and finally returned to the UK for her last years. Camberwell is a district of London in the London Borough of Southwark. ... March 26 is the 85th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (86th in leap years). ... Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Covent Garden is a district in central London and within the easterly bounds of the City of Westminster. ... Motto: (French for God and my right) Anthem: God Save the King/Queen Capital London (de facto) Largest city London Official language(s) English (de facto) Unification    - by Athelstan AD 927  Area    - Total 130,395 km² (1st in UK)   50,346 sq mi  Population    - 2006 est. ... Chatham Dockyard, located on the River Medway in Kent, England, came into existence at the time when, following the Reformation, relations with the Catholic countries of Europe had worsened, and thus requiring added defences. ... Domestic service also called simply service is the employment of people for wages in their employers residence. ...


His father and mother were each the first in their families to receive a university education; they met and became engaged while students at the Institute of Education at the University of London, but were unable to get married for some years because his father had to care for his own mother and siblings. His father worked as a secondary-school teacher of physics, chemistry and mathematics. His mother also taught secondary school mathematics for a time, but had to give this up when he was born. He was eventually followed by two sisters, Clare and Judith, and two brothers, Terence and Paul. His parents were both Catholics, so all the siblings were brought up in that faith. Although he ceased to be a practicing Catholic in his early twenties, he still wonders from time to time how far the experience, in childhood and adolescence, of maintaining and defending, sometimes in public and in the face of some ridicule, beliefs and attitudes not shared by the vast majority of his compatriots may have influenced his subsequent attitude to physics and indeed to life in general. The University of London is a university based primarily in London. ... Physics (from the Greek, (phúsis), nature and (phusiké), knowledge of nature) is the science concerned with the discovery and understanding of the fundamental laws which govern matter, energy, space, and time. ... Chemistry (from Greek χημεία khemeia[1] meaning alchemy) is the science of matter at the atomic to molecular scale, dealing primarily with collections of atoms, such as gases, molecules, crystals, and metals. ... Euclid, Greek mathematician, 3rd century BC, known today as the father of geometry; shown here in a detail of The School of Athens by Raphael. ...


Soon after he was born, his parents bought a house in Upper Norwood, just outside the southern boundary of London proper. However, when he was eighteen months old, war broke out and he was 'evacuated' to Englefield Green, a small village in Surrey on the edge of the great park of Windsor Palace, where he stayed for the duration of the war. Upper Norwood is an elevated area in south London, England within the postcode SE19. ... Map sources for Englefield Green at grid reference: SU 993 710 Englefield Green is a village of 7500 people in northern Surrey, UK. It is near the south eastern corner of Windsor Great Park, Royal Holloway, University of London and the towns of Egham, Old Windsor and Virginia Water. ... Not to be confused with Surry. ... Windsor castle. ...


After the end of the war, he returned to the Upper Norwood house and lived there until 1950; his father taught at a school in north-east London and his mother looked after the five children full time. He attended the local Catholic primary school, and later, following a successful performance in the "eleven plus" examination which he took rather earlier than most, transferred to the College of the Sacred Heart in Wimbledon. Primary or elementary education is the first years of formal, structured education that occurs during childhood. ... The Eleven Plus is an examination which was given to students in their last year of primary education in the United Kingdom under the Tripartite System. ... Wimbledon (pronounced ) is a suburb of London, part of the London Borough of Merton and located seven miles (11. ...


He competed for, and obtained, a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in December 1954. In early October of 1955 he went up to Oxford to take up his scholarship, with the intention of reading (majoring in) the degree technically known as Literae Humaniores, and informally as Greats. College name Balliol College Named after John de Balliol Established 1263 Sister College St Johns Master Andrew Graham JCR President Jack Hawkins Undergraduates 403 MCR President Chelsea Payne Graduates 228 Homepage Boatclub Balliol College, founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in... Literae Humaniores is the name given to the study of Classics at Oxford and some other universities. ...


He then quickly 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 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. Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. ... College name Magdalen College Collegium Beatae Mariae Magdalenae Named after Mary Magdalene Established 1458 Sister College Magdalene College President Professor David Clary FRS JCR President Jessica Jones Undergraduates 395 MCR President Kader Allouni Graduates 230 Homepage Boatclub Magdalen College (pronounced ) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of...


Dirk's supervisory style was somewhat unusual. He 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. In the end his thesis work 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). General Name, Symbol, Number helium, He, 2 Chemical series noble gases Group, Period, Block 18, 1, s Appearance colorless Atomic mass 4. ... Normals modes of vibration progression through a crystal. ... Helium II will creep along surfaces in order to find its own level - after a short while, the levels in the two containers will equalize. ...


Oxford University awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005. The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford, England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... An honorary degree (Latin: honoris causa ad gradum, not to be confused with an honors degree) is an academic degree awarded to an individual as a decoration, rather than as the result of matriculating and studying for several years. ... A Doctor of Letters is a university academic degree. ...


Career

As a postdoc Legett spent the period August 1964 - August 1965 at 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. The University of Sussex is an English campus university located near the East Sussex village of Falmer, near Brighton and Hove. ...


In the summer of 1972 he became engaged to Haruko Kinase, at that time an undergraduate student at Sussex, and they married in June 1972. In 1978, they had a daughter Asako.


In the spring of 1982 he accepted an offer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of the MacArthur Chair with which the university had recently been endowed, and after the three of us had been across for a visit. 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. His wife Haruko eventually obtained a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois, and is currently doing research on the hospice system; and his daughter Asako has graduated, also from UIUC, with a joint major in geography and chemistry. His 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 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. For the next five years, he will spend at least two months a year on campus at the Institute for Quantum Computing.


External links


  Results from FactBites:
 
Leggett, Anthony James - Hutchinson encyclopedia article about Leggett, Anthony James (277 words)
Leggett developed a theory in the 1970s of how individual helium atoms interact to form this ordered structure.
Leggett was born in London, England, and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, England, in 1964.
Leggett then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, in 1983.
Anthony James Leggett (1061 words)
Sir Anthony James Leggett KBE (born March 26, 1938 in Camberwell, London, England), is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He 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.
Leggett believes quantum mechanics may be incomplete because of the quantum measurement problem.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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