Philip W. Anderson
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Philip Warren Anderson
Nobel Prize in Physics 1977
Born: 13 December 1923, Indianapolis, IN, USA
Died: 29 March 2020, Princeton, NJ, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems”
Prize share: 1/3
Work
Solid materials often have a regular crystalline structure and composition, but sometimes they constitute disordered systems. These could be alloys with a regular structure but a more random composition. Other solid materials, such as glass, lack a regular structure. In 1958 Philip Anderson showed the conditions under which an electron can move about freely within a disordered system and when it is more or less bound to a specific place. This and other works have contributed to a deeper understanding of electrical phenomena in disordered systems.
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