CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Anthony J. Leggett, a professor of physics at the U. of I., was named an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics during an awards dinner today (Jan. 21) at the Savoy Hotel in London.
Leggett, 60, who holds the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair of Physics and is a professor in the U. of I.'s Center for Advanced Study, was named a Fellow along with Stephen Hawking, Sir Roger Penrose, Peter Higgs and Sir Michael Berry.
The awards were presented by Sir Gareth Roberts, the president of the IOP, a learned society for professional physicists charged by British Royal Charter to "promote the advancement and dissemination of a knowledge of and education in the science of physics, pure and applied." The IOP is celebrating its 125th anniversary.
Leggett's "particularly important contribution" was prominently mentioned in the citation for the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics, which was awarded to two professors at Cornell University and one at Stanford University. Leggett assisted in their interpretation of the discovery that led to a breakthrough in low-temperature physics.
A native of London, Leggett earned his doctorate in physics from Oxford University. He has been a member of the U. of I. faculty since 1983. He has achieved many honors, including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics; he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society; he has been awarded the Maxwell Medal and Prize of the IOP and the Simon Memorial Prize of the IOP; and he is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences.
Leggett's areas of research include macroscopic manifestations of quantum mechanics, high-temperature superconductivity, and the thermal and acoustic properties of glass.
The IOP limits the number of Honorary Fellows at any one time to 20 and requires that they be distinguished persons intimately connected with physics or a science allied thereto whom the institute especially desires to honor for exceptionally important services in connection therewith.
Leggett was honored by the IOP for having made "fundamental contributions to theory of superfluidity in helium-3" and for "contributions to the quantum mechanics of macroscopic systems," according to the institute. "A large body of both theoretical and experimental work has resulted in many of his predictions being confirmed experimentally."
Hawking has been Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge since 1979. Along with Penrose, the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Hawking predicted that a star collapsing to form a black hole would ultimately form a singularity.
Higgs, professor emeritus at Edinburgh University, has made outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, in particular, in explaining why the W and Z bosons have mass. Berry is a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Bristol and has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the foundations of quantum physics. In particular, he discovered the geometrical quantum phase, now known as the Berry phase.