Tony Leggett (1938-2026): condensed matter theorist
Ross H. McKenzie (noreply@blogger.com)
Tony Leggett died last week. The New York Times has a nice obituary. One measure of his influence on me is that more than 20 posts on this blog feature his work. He received the Nobel Prize in 2003 for developing the theory of superfluid 3He.
In 1972, a graduate student at Cornell, Doug Osheroff, discovered a phase transition around a temperature of 2 mK in liquid 3He. In the 1960s liquid 3He was established to be a Fermi liquid that was beautifully described by Landau's theory. Osheroff and...