Anthony James Leggett facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sir
Anthony Leggett
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Leggett in 2007
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| Born |
Anthony James Leggett
26 March 1938 Camberwell, London, England
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| Citizenship | British and American |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford (BA, DPhil) |
| Known for |
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| Spouse(s) |
Haruko Kinase
(m. 1972) |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics |
| Institutions |
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| Thesis | (1964) |
| Doctoral advisor | Dirk ter Haar |
| Doctoral students |
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Sir Anthony James Leggett (born 26 March 1938) is a British-American theoretical physicist. He is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Leggett is famous for his work on low-temperature physics. He won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for his important discoveries about superfluidity.
Superfluidity is a strange state where a liquid flows without any friction. Sir Anthony helped us understand how normal and superfluid helium liquids behave. He also guided research into how quantum physics works in larger systems.
Contents
Early Life and School
Anthony Leggett was born in Camberwell, South London, in 1938. His family had a history of being cobblers and greengrocers. His parents were the first in their families to go to university. His father taught physics, chemistry, and mathematics at a secondary school. His mother also taught math for a while.
When he was very young, World War II started. He was moved to a small village called Englefield Green for safety. After the war, he returned to London. He went to a local primary school. Later, he passed an important exam called the "11-plus" and went to Wimbledon College.
He then attended Beaumont College, a Jesuit school. Here, he mainly studied classics, which was considered a very important subject. Even though he focused on classics, his father ran a science club for him and his brothers. Anthony was very good at school and won many prizes in his last year.
University Studies
In 1954, Anthony Leggett won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He started university the next year, planning to study classics. After finishing his first degree, he decided to study physics at Merton College, Oxford.
He began his research under the guidance of Dirk ter Haar, a theoretical physics expert. His main research was about liquid helium. He studied how different types of helium behave at very low temperatures. In 2005, the University of Oxford gave him an honorary degree.
Career and Research
After finishing his studies, Leggett worked as a researcher at UIUC in the United States from 1964 to 1965. He then spent a year in Japan at Kyoto University.
In 1967, he became a lecturer at the University of Sussex in England. He worked there for about 15 years. During this time, he also spent time in Japan and Ghana.
In 1982, he moved back to UIUC in the United States. He has been there ever since.
Sir Anthony's research has explored many exciting areas of physics:
- The behavior of glass at very cold temperatures.
- High-temperature superconductivity, which is about materials that can conduct electricity with no resistance at higher temperatures than usual.
- Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) atomic gases, which are a special state of matter.
- Testing the rules of quantum mechanics to see if they apply to larger objects, not just tiny atoms.
From 2006 to 2016, he also worked at the Institute for Quantum Computing in Canada. As of 2023, he is the chief scientist at the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory at UIUC. He also helped start the Shanghai Center for Complex Physics in 2013.
His research also looks at superconductivity in certain materials and topological quantum computation. He has debated with other scientists about whether quantum theory is complete. Leggett believes it might be incomplete because of the "quantum measurement problem." This problem asks how a quantum system chooses one outcome when it's measured.
Awards and Honors
Sir Anthony Leggett has received many important awards and honors for his work:
- He is a member of several important science groups, including the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in London.
- In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared this prize with two other scientists for their work on superconductors and superfluids.
- He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by the Queen in 2004 for his contributions to physics.
- He also won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2002/2003.
Personal Life
In 1973, Anthony Leggett married Haruko Kinase. They met at Sussex University. In 1978, they had a daughter named Asako. His wife, Haruko, earned a PhD in cultural anthropology. Their daughter, Asako, also graduated from UIUC. She has dual citizenship in the US and the UK.
See also
In Spanish: Anthony J. Leggett para niños
- List of University of Waterloo people
