CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Physics professor and Nobel laureate Anthony Leggett, a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, has donated his papers from more than 50 years of research and teaching to the University of Illinois Archives.
Leggett has been the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1983. His research lies within the fields of theoretical condensed matter physics and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids.
Leggett is most widely recognized for his contributions to the explanation of superfluidity, the property of some fluids to flow freely without viscosity. The theory of superconductivity – that some materials lose all electrical resistance when cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero – was developed by Illinois researchers John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer, for which they received the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Building on their work, Leggett showed how a generalization of their theory could explain the mysterious behavior of the light isotope of helium at very low temperatures. His work shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and other strongly coupled superfluids. He won the Nobel Prize for his theory explaining how atoms interact and are ordered in the superfluid state of a rare helium isotope.
He also has made seminal theoretical contributions to our understanding of how spectacular quantum-mechanical effects can be seen even at larger scales.
Leggett has been awarded numerous honors in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the Wolf Foundation Prize for research on condensed forms of matter. Leggett is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom “for services to physics.”
At University Archives, Leggett’s papers join those of two-time Nobel laureate Bardeen, an electrical and computer engineering and physics professor with whom Leggett worked as a postdoctoral student; and those of biophysicist and microbiologist Carl R. Woese, who was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Leggett’s material includes his early correspondence, research and lectures from the start of his career in England and from stints he spent teaching and researching in Japan, China and Ghana. Leggett has kept voluminous course lectures over the years, handwritten research notes (usually scribbled on the back of discarded printouts), correspondence with scholars across the globe, and his reviews of research and reference letters for colleagues and students.
A 1972 letter from Bob Richardson, a senior experimentalist at Cornell University, described the reaction at a conference to Leggett’s work: “Your letter to me and the subsequent preliminary article … have created quite a stir. The result of your calculations is tremendously exciting.”
The papers include one of Leggett’s earliest notebooks for his undergraduate physics classes at Oxford University’s Merton College, filled with notes and equations written in small, precise handwriting. Also among the items are hand-drawn illustrations and measurements for the white tie and tails he wore at the Nobel award ceremony in Stockholm.
“The donation of Anthony Leggett’s archives is particularly significant because of how his papers will connect with what we curate within our Natural and Applied Science Archives,” University Archivist William Maher said. “The research value of any one collection increases exponentially with the addition of related scientific research archives.”
History of science researchers will be able to compare and contrast in one location the way two of the world’s greatest researchers approached issues involving conductivity and fluidity at very low temperatures.
“There are few other places on Earth where this could happen,” Maher said.
Also, because Leggett did the majority of his groundbreaking research at Illinois, his archives will provide a unique window into the recent institutional history of physics studies on campus, said Susanne Belovari, the archivist for faculty papers at University Archives. Since its creation more than 50 years ago, University Archives has become internationally known for the breadth and quality of its science and technology collections.
“Graduate and advanced researchers hunger after collections like these. We are very fortunate that Professor Leggett has decided to entrust his papers to us so we can make them available to researchers worldwide,” Belovari said.
Leggett was born in London in 1938 and attended Oxford University. He earned undergraduate degrees in Literae Humaniores (classics, philosophy and history) and in physics, and a doctorate in theoretical physics. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Illinois and in Kyoto, Japan, before joining the faculty at the University of Sussex. He joined the Illinois faculty in 1983, and he was a professor in the Center for Advanced Study and a co-founder of the U. of I.’s Institute for Condensed Matter in 2007. He retired in December 2019.