Sir Anthony James Leggett (born 26 March 1938) is a British–Americantheoretical physicist andprofessor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).[5] Leggett is widely recognised as a world leader in the theory oflow-temperature physics, and his pioneering work onsuperfluidity was recognised by the 2003Nobel Prize in Physics.[6] He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids.[7] He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopicdissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations ofquantum mechanics.[8][9]
Leggett was born inCamberwell, south London, and raisedCatholic.[10] His father's forebears were village cobblers in a small village in Hampshire; Leggett's grandfather broke with this tradition to become a greengrocer; his father would relate how he used to ride with him to buy vegetables at theCovent Garden market in London. His mother's parents were of Irish descent; her father had moved to Britain and worked as a clerk in thenaval dockyard in Chatham.[10] His maternal grandmother, who survived into her eighties, was sent out todomestic 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.
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 theUniversity 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 ofphysics,chemistry andmathematics. 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, all raised in their parents'Roman Catholic faith. Leggett ceased to be a practisingCatholic in his early twenties.[10]
Soon after he was born, his parents bought a house inUpper Norwood, south London. When he was 18 months old, WWII broke out and he was evacuated toEnglefield Green, a small village inSurrey on the edge of the great park ofWindsor Castle, where he stayed for the duration of the war. 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 the11-plus, which he took rather earlier than most, and then transferred toWimbledon College.[citation needed]
He later attended Beaumont College, a Jesuit school in Old Windsor. He and his two younger brothers, Terrence and Paul, attended Beaumont as a consequence of his father's appointment to teach science at the college. While there, Leggett primarily studied classics, since that was generally regarded as the most prestigious field at the time; this study led directly to hisGreats degree while at Oxford. Despite Leggett's emphasis on classics at Beaumont, his father ran an evening 'science club' for his younger son and a couple of others. In his last year at Beaumont, Leggett won every single prize for the subjects that he studied that year.
Leggett won a scholarship toBalliol College, Oxford, in December 1954 and entered the university the following year with the intention of reading the degree technically known asLiterae Humaniores (classics). After completing his first degree he began a second undergraduate degree, this time in physics atMerton College, Oxford.[11] One person who was willing to overlook Leggett's unorthodox credentials wasDirk ter Haar, then a reader in theoretical physics and a fellow ofMagdalen College, Oxford; so Leggett signed up for research under ter Haar's supervision. As with all of 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 liquidhelium, one on higher-orderphonon interaction processes insuperfluid4He and the other on the properties of dilute solutions of4He in normal liquid3He (a system which turned out to be much less experimentally accessible than the other side of the phase diagram, dilute solutions of3He in4He). TheUniversity of Oxford awarded Leggett anHonorary DLitt in June 2005.[citation needed]
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 theUniversity of Sussex, where he was to spend the majority of the next fifteen years of his career. During the mid 1970s, he spent considerable time in Japan at theUniversity of Tokyo and also atKwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
In early 1982 he accepted an offer from UIUC of the MacArthur Chair with which the university had recently been endowed. As he had already committed himself to an eight-month stay as a visiting scientist at Cornell in early 1983,[12] 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 superfluid3He since around 1980; he worked inter alia on the low-temperature properties of glasses, high-temperature superconductivity, theBose–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.
The edition of 29 December 2005 of theInternational Herald Tribune printed an article, "New tests of Einstein's 'spooky' reality", which referred to Leggett's Autumn 2005 debate at a conference inBerkeley, California, with fellow Nobel laureateNorman Ramsey ofHarvard University.[14] 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 thequantum measurement problem.
In June 1973, he married Haruko Kinase. They met at Sussex University, in Brighton, England. In 1978, they had a daughter Asako.[10] His wife Haruko earned a PhD[10] in cultural anthropology from UIUC and has done research on the hospice system.[10] Their daughter, Asako, also graduated from UIUC with a joint major in geography and chemistry. She holds dual US/UK citizenship.[10]
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