The Nineteenth Annual Moti Lal Rustgi Memorial Lecture
What can we do with a quantum liquid?
Prof. Anthony J. Leggett
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: Friday, March 29, 2013
Time: 5:00 pm
Room: 225 Natural Sciences Complex, UB North Campus
Free and Open to the Public
For information contact the Physics Department
(716) 645-2017 or Email: ubphysics@buffalo.edu
Lecture Poster
Abstract
Quantum liquids are physical systems which display the effects not only of quantum mechanics but also those of quantum statistics,that is of the characteristic indistinguishability of elementary particles. The most spectacular manifestations of quantum statistics are the phenomenon of Bose-Einstein condensation and the closely related one of Cooper pairing; in both cases a finite fraction of all the particles in the system are forced to all do exactly the same thing at the same time, and as a result effects which would normally be obscured by thermal noise may become visible, sometimes spectacularly so. I will review some examples of such behavior in degenerate alkali gases, superconductors and superfluid helium-3.
Biography
Sir Anthony J. Leggett studied physics at Oxford University, which awarded him his doctoral degree in 1963 and an Honorary Doctorate in 2005. After postdoctoral research at Illinois, Kyoto, Oxford and Harvard, he served on the faculty of the University of Sussex, and since 1983 as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois. 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. His research on cuprate superconductivity, superfluidity in atomic gases, amorphous solids at low temperature, topological quantum computation, and the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, have been recognized by the Maxwell Medal and Prize, the Paul Dirac Medal, the Wolf Prize in Physics, and several other awards. 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, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), the American Physical Society, and the Indian National Science Academy. 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".
