Leggett has been awarded the newly created position of Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Distinguished Research Chair
WATERLOO, Ont., (Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007) -- A winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics will bring his considerable talents and knowledge north in what can only be considered a brain gain. Sir Anthony J. Leggett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Waterloo.
Leggett has been awarded the newly created position of Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Distinguished Research Chair. While continuing his position at the University of Illinois, he will spend at least two months in the spring, and maintain contact at other points, of each of the next five years working as a research professor with the Institute for Quantum Computing and with the department of physics and astronomy at UW.
He will be one of a handful of Nobel laureates holding faculty positions in Canada.
"We are extremely gratified to be formalizing our relationship with this internationally renowned expert in condensed matter physics," said Amit Chakma, UW's vice-president academic and provost. "His contributions will greatly benefit the university's research efforts. Our younger scholars -- graduate students and junior professors -- will particularly benefit from Dr. Leggett's significant abilities."
Leggett will advise on promising research directions, help younger scholars develop their research programs and share his knowledge with the general public. His specific duties include:
- Supervising UW graduate students here and on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a faculty member since 1983,
- Offering seminars to undergraduate and graduate students,
- Delivering public lectures, * mentoring newly recruited professors, and
- Guiding research direction as a member of IQC's scientific advisory committee.
Leggett was a visiting scholar with UW and IQC during June and July of last year, delivering lectures to the on-campus community and the general public. The experience was sufficiently stimulating and rewarding that Leggett was quick to accept an invitation to formalize the relationship.
"By virtue of having assembled an outstanding cluster of computer scientists, mathematicians and theoretical and experimental physicists, all sharing a common language, and thanks to its generous support from both private and public sources," explained Leggett, "the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo has already become an international leader in the exploding field of quantum information.
"I am particularly excited by the potential for fruitful interaction between this field and the more mature area of condensed matter physics in which I have spent much of my career, and I am looking forward enormously to ongoing participation in the activities of the institute."
Leggett is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics. His pioneering work on superfluidity earned him and two colleagues the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. More information on his background and research is available at link
Leggett and the university will mark the new arrangement with a public lecture at 2 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 26, at UW's Centre for Environmental and Information Technology.
Entitled "Does the Everyday World Really Obey Quantum Mechanics?",Leggett's lecture will explore the idea -- commonly held by physicists -- that quantum mechanics offers the "whole truth" about the world. He will review a major problem with that view, some popular resolutions to the problem, the current experimental situation and prospects for the future.