Leggett, Anthony J.

▪ British physicist

born March 26, 1938, London, England

      British physicist, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2003 for his seminal work on superfluidity. He shared the award with the Russian physicists Alexey A. Abrikosov (Abrikosov, Alexey A.) and Vitaly L. Ginzburg (Ginzburg, Vitaly Lazarevich).

      Leggett received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford in 1964. In 1967 he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex, where he served until 1983, when he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

      Leggett conducted his pioneering research on superfluidity, a phenomenon in which certain extremely cold liquid substances flow without internal resistance, or viscosity. Superfluids exhibit a variety of odd behaviour, including the ability to flow up the sides and out the top of containers. Scientists had known since the 1930s that the common form of helium, the isotope helium-4, becomes a superfluid when chilled. Although a theoretical explanation was produced for the phenomenon, researchers in the 1970s discovered it did not work for the much rarer helium isotope helium-3, which was also found to be a superfluid. Leggett filled the gap in theoretical research by showing that electrons in helium-3 form pairs in a situation similar to, but much more complicated than, the electron pairs that form in superconducting metals. His work in identifying and describing the phase transitions that occur during these pairing interactions found wide application in science, ranging from cosmology to the study of subatomic particles and liquid crystals.

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