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P. W. Anderson

Philip Warren Anderson
Andersonphoto.jpg
Born (1923-12-13) December 13, 1923 (age 93)
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Nationality United States
Fields Physics
Institutions Bell Laboratories
Princeton University
Cambridge University
Alma mater Harvard University
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Doctoral advisor John Hasbrouck van Vleck
Doctoral students F. Duncan M. Haldane
Piers Coleman
Khandker Abdul Muttalib
Known for
Notable awards

Philip Warren Anderson (born December 13, 1923) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson has made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking (including a seminal paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena.

Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and grew up in Urbana, Illinois. He graduated from University Laboratory High School in Urbana in 1940. Afterwards, he went to Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate work, with a wartime stint at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in-between. In graduate school he studied under John Hasbrouck van Vleck.

From 1949 to 1984 he was employed by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked on a wide variety of problems in condensed matter physics. During this period he developed what is now called Anderson localization (the idea that extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system); invented the Anderson Hamiltonian, which describes the site-wise interaction of electrons in a transition metal; proposed symmetry breaking within particle physics (this played a crucial role in the development of the Standard Model and the development of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, which in turn generates mass in some elementary particles); created the pseudospin approach to the BCS theory of superconductivity; made seminal studies of non-s-wave pairing (both symmetry-breaking and microscopic mechanism) in the superfluidity of He3; and helped found the area of spin-glasses. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.


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