Yale's Girvin Honored for His Work on Quantum States of Matter

Steven M. Girvin, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Applied Physics, jointly with James P. Eisenstein of Caltech, and Allan H. MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin, will receive the Oliver E. Buckley award of the American Physical Society (APS), the most distinguished award in condensed matter physics.

The prize, including an honorarium and certificate, will be presented at the APS March 2007 meeting in Denver, Colorado, at a special ceremonial session. His citation reads, “For their fundamental experimental and theoretical research on correlated many-electron states in low dimensional systems.”

Girvin joined the Yale faculty in 2001, where his research has focused on strongly correlated quantum states of matter and the quantum phase transitions that separate them.  He is currently working closely with his experimentalist colleagues Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret on developing “circuit QED,” a new paradigm of quantum optics and quantum computation using superconducting electrical circuits.

Much honored, Girvin is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society. He has authored 200 papers in professional journals and has presented 375 seminars and colloquia on his work.

In 1999, he co-founded the Boulder Summer School in Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, which each summer brings together graduate students from all over the world for intensive study of frontier research topics of current interest. His capacity to bring the complexities of quantum theories to a general audience was highlighted in a recent public lecture, “Quantum Money, Teleportation and Computation.”