Category:Condensed matter physicists

In 1957, Alexei Abrikosov published the theoretical description of vortex lattices in type-II superconductors, work that would earn him a Nobel Prize nearly five decades later. That long delay between insight and recognition is characteristic of the field represented in this category. Condensed matter physics studies the collective behavior of large assemblies of atoms and electrons in solids, liquids, and other dense phases, and its practitioners often spend careers refining ideas whose consequences only become testable, or technologically relevant, after instrumentation catches up.

The biographies grouped here belong to physicists whose principal contributions lie in this domain: superconductivity, superfluidity, magnetism, semiconductor physics, topological states of matter, neutron and electron scattering, low-dimensional systems, and the electronic properties of novel materials. The category brings together theorists and experimentalists, and spans roughly the postwar consolidation of solid-state physics through the present interest in graphene, topological insulators, and quantum information substrates.

Background

Condensed matter physics emerged as a distinct subdiscipline in the decades after the Second World War, growing out of what had earlier been called solid-state physics. The change in name, promoted in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, reflected an expanded scope that included liquids, glasses, soft matter, and quantum fluids alongside crystalline solids. The field absorbed the band theory developed in the 1930s, the BCS theory of superconductivity articulated in 1957, and the renormalization-group methods that reshaped the understanding of phase transitions in the 1970s.

Institutionally, the discipline grew at industrial laboratories and large universities. Bell Labs, IBM Research, and the national laboratories in the United States produced a substantial fraction of postwar discoveries, while Cambridge, Moscow, Grenoble, Jülich, and Tokyo were comparable centers abroad. Many of the physicists in this category held appointments at such laboratories before, after, or alongside academic posts. The reactor-based neutron scattering programs at Oak Ridge and Chalk River, the dilution refrigerator work at Cornell and Bell, and the molecular beam epitaxy facilities developed in industry all shaped what could be measured and therefore what could be theorized.

The Nobel Prize record reflects this institutional density. Condensed matter topics have been recognized in physics prizes for the quantum Hall effects, high-temperature superconductivity, giant magnetoresistance, graphene, topological phase transitions, conducting polymers, and quantum dots, among others. A high proportion of the biographies collected here are Nobel laureates, which is partly a consequence of the field's size and partly of its repeated demonstration that fundamental discoveries can issue in widely deployed technologies.

Notable members

Several distinct sub-fields are represented among the people in this category.

Superconductivity and superfluidity are covered by Alexei Abrikosov, whose theory of the mixed state organized the understanding of type-II materials, Anthony Leggett, who provided the theoretical framework for the superfluid phases of helium-3, and Douglas Osheroff, who as a graduate student at Cornell identified those phases experimentally in 1971 to 1972.

The quantum Hall effects, both integer and fractional, are represented by Daniel Tsui and Horst Stormer, who together with Arthur Gossard observed the fractional effect in 1982, and by Robert Laughlin, whose wavefunction explained the fractional state in terms of an incompressible quantum liquid of correlated electrons. The closely related topological ideas that grew out of this work are associated with David Thouless, F. Duncan Haldane, and J. Michael Kosterlitz, who shared the 2016 Nobel Prize for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. Haldane's predictions for spin chains and for anomalous Hall states without external magnetic fields, and the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in two-dimensional systems, are now standard reference points across the field.

Magnetism and spintronics are represented by Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg, who independently discovered giant magnetoresistance in 1988. The effect was incorporated into hard disk read heads within a decade, an unusually rapid transit from laboratory to industry.

Two-dimensional materials and graphene are represented by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, whose 2004 paper on the isolation and characterization of monolayer graphite catalyzed a large research program on van der Waals materials.

Scattering techniques are represented by Bertram Brockhouse and Clifford Shull, who developed inelastic and elastic neutron scattering, respectively, into routine probes of phonon dispersions, magnetic structures, and atomic arrangements. Their methods underlie much of what is known about the microscopic dynamics of crystals.

Conducting polymers, a soft-matter and chemistry-adjacent topic, are represented by Alan Heeger, a co-discoverer of metallic conduction in doped polyacetylene. Nanoscale semiconductor physics is represented by Alexei Ekimov, who observed size-dependent optical effects in semiconductor nanocrystals embedded in glass, contributing to the early experimental basis for quantum dots.

John Hopfield sits somewhat apart, having moved from semiconductor and excitonic problems in his early career toward biophysics and neural network models. His trajectory illustrates how condensed matter training, with its emphasis on collective behavior and statistical mechanics, has migrated into adjacent areas including biology, machine learning, and quantum information.

Methods and characteristic problems

The physicists in this category tend to work on problems where the interesting behavior is not present in any single constituent. Superconductivity, magnetism, charge density waves, and the quantum Hall effects are properties of the many-body system, often arising from interactions that are individually weak. The theoretical toolkit accordingly emphasizes mean-field theory, perturbative expansions, the renormalization group, and a variety of variational and topological constructions. The experimental toolkit emphasizes low temperatures, high magnetic fields, ultraclean samples, and probes such as neutron and X-ray scattering, angle-resolved photoemission, scanning tunneling microscopy, and transport measurements.

A recurring pattern in the careers represented here is the partnership between materials growth, measurement, and theory. The fractional quantum Hall discovery depended on Gossard's molecular beam epitaxy of high-mobility gallium arsenide heterostructures. The graphene work depended on a mechanical exfoliation technique simple enough to teach undergraduates. The giant magnetoresistance discoveries depended on sputtered multilayer films of well-controlled thickness. Theoretical advances in this field have repeatedly followed, rather than preceded, the appearance of new materials platforms, and the biographies in this category often record close working relationships across these specialties.

See also

• Category:Physicists
• Category:Nobel laureates in Physics
• Category:Materials scientists
• Category:Theoretical physicists