Condensed matter physics is the field of physics that deals with the macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter, especially the solid and liquid phases, that arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms and electrons. More generally, the subject deals with condensed phases of matter: systems of many constituents with strong interactions among them. More exotic condensed phases include the superconducting phase exhibited by certain materials at extremely low cryogenic temperatures, the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases of spins on crystal lattices of atoms, the Bose–Einstein condensates found in ultracold atomic systems, and liquid crystals. Condensed matter physicists seek to understand the behavior of these phases by experiments to measure various material properties, and by applying the physical laws of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, and other physics theories to develop mathematical models and predict the properties of extremely large groups of atoms.
Physics is the scientific study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
This is a timeline of quantum computing.
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of the system. In the most common version, the trajectories of atoms and molecules are determined by numerically solving Newton's equations of motion for a system of interacting particles, where forces between the particles and their potential energies are often calculated using interatomic potentials or molecular mechanical force fields. The method is applied mostly in chemical physics, materials science, and biophysics.
John Clarke Slater was an American physicist who advanced the theory of the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solids. He also made major contributions to microwave electronics. He received a B.S. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1920 and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard in 1923, then did post-doctoral work at the universities of Cambridge (briefly) and Copenhagen. On his return to the U.S. he joined the physics department at Harvard.
Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research has focused on experiments that trap and cool atoms to temperatures close to absolute zero, and he led one of the first groups to realize Bose–Einstein condensation in these systems in 1995. For this achievement, as well as early fundamental studies of condensates, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, together with Eric Allin Cornell and Carl Wieman.
Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas was a British physicist and applied mathematician. He is best known for his contributions to atomic and molecular physics and solid-state physics. His key achievements include calculating relativistic effects on the spin-orbit interaction in a hydrogen atom, creating an approximate theory of -body quantum systems, and devising an efficient method for solving tridiagonal system of linear equations.
Sankar Das Sarma is an India-born American theoretical condensed matter physicist. He has been a member of the department of physics at University of Maryland, College Park since 1980.
Amir Ordacgi Caldeira is a Brazilian physicist. He received his bachelor's degree in 1973 from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, his M.Sc. degree in 1976 from the same university, and his Ph.D. in 1980 from University of Sussex. His Ph.D. advisor was the Physics Nobel Prize winner Anthony James Leggett. He joined the faculty at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) in 1980. In 1984 he did post-doctoral work at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at University of California, Santa Barbara and at the Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory at IBM. In 1994–1995 he spent a sabbatical at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a full professor at Universidade Estadual de Campinas. He was the recipient of the Wataghin Prize, from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, for his contributions to theoretical physics in 1986.
Daniel Loss is a Swiss theoretical physicist and a professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Basel and RIKEN. With David P. DiVincenzo, he proposed the Loss-DiVincenzo quantum computer in 1997, which would use electron spins in quantum dots as qubits.
Alexander Leonidovich Kuzemsky is a Russian theoretical physicist.
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018, and was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society ForMemRS in 2023. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics 2017–2019, and is Editor-in-Chief of Reports on Progress in Physics 2022-.
Bikas Kanta Chakrabarti (born 14 December 1952 in Kolkata is an Indian physicist. At present he is INSA Scientist at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics & Visiting Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India.
Paul Anthony Benioff was an American physicist who helped pioneer the field of quantum computing. Benioff was best known for his research in quantum information theory during the 1970s and 80s that demonstrated the theoretical possibility of quantum computers by describing the first quantum mechanical model of a computer. In this work, Benioff showed that a computer could operate under the laws of quantum mechanics by describing a Schrödinger equation description of Turing machines. Benioff's body of work in quantum information theory encompassed quantum computers, quantum robots, and the relationship between foundations in logic, math, and physics.
Valerii Vinokur is a condensed matter physicist who works on superconductivity, the physics of vortices, disordered media and glasses, nonequilibrium physics of dissipative systems, quantum phase transitions, quantum thermodynamics, and topological quantum matter. He is a senior scientist and Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior scientist at the Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering, Office of Research and National Laboratories, The University of Chicago. He is a Foreign Member of the National Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Amnon Aharony is an Israeli Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and in the Physics Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. After years of research on statistical physics, his current research focuses on condensed matter theory, especially in mesoscopic physics and spintronics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of several other academies. He also received several prizes, including the Rothschild Prize in Physical Sciences, and the Gunnar Randers Research Prize, awarded every other year by the King of Norway.
Giuseppe Carleo is an Italian physicist. He is a professor of computational physics at EPFL and the head of the Laboratory of Computational Quantum Science.
Dietrich Belitz is an American theoretical physicist on the faculty of the University of Oregon. He studies statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics.
Mordehai "Moty" Heiblum is an Israeli electrical engineer and condensed matter physicist, known for his research in mesoscopic physics.
Fausto Martelli is an Italian physicist based in the United Kingdom. He is a senior research scientist at IBM Research Europe since 2018 and Honorary Lecturer at the University of Manchester since 2022. He previously held a position of faculty associate researcher at the Department of Chemistry, Princeton University. His background is in the physics and chemistry of disordered materials with a focus on the properties of soft matter.
