William L. McMillan

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William Laughlin McMillan (born January 13, 1936 in Little Rock , Arkansas , † August 30, 1984 ) was an American solid-state physicist , known for research on superconductors .

McMillan's father was a civil engineer with Scottish ancestry and his mother came from a southern family that owned the Georgia Southern Railroad . He studied electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas with a bachelor's degree in 1958 (where he worked in the summer months at RCA and IBM ) and physics with a master's degree in 1959. In 1964 he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with John Bardeen in physics doctorate with a thesis on the ground state of liquid helium, where he used Monte Carlo techniques early on. He was then a member of Bell Laboratories until 1972 . In 1972 he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which he remained until his death - he was hit by a car as a cyclist.

In the 1960s he and John Rowell at Bell Labs determined the phonon spectra of superconductors from the tunnel data of electrons . In addition to superconductors, he dealt with liquid helium , liquid crystals , spin glasses and localization phenomena. He turned to liquid crystals in the 1960s during a sabbatical year at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and in Orsay with Pierre Gilles de Gennes (with whom he was again a year in 1978/79). He investigated experimental predictions from a Landau-type theory of phase transitions in liquid crystals. He also dealt with the phase transition in charge density waves , the metal-insulator phase transition, thin films as liquid helium and Monte Carlo simulations of the Ising model.

For his theoretical investigations he developed his own computer hardware and renormalization group procedures.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1982) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1983). In 1978 he received the Fritz London Memorial Award with John Rowell. The William L. McMillan Award from the University of Illinois is named after him.

As a schoolboy he played various instruments in jazz bands. He had been married to Joyce Anne Stairs since 1958, with whom he had four children.

He also published with Philip Warren Anderson .

Fonts

  • with Rowell Lead phonon spectrum calculated from superconducting density of states , Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 14, 1964, pp. 108-112
  • Theory of superconductor-normal-metal-interfaces , Phys. Rev., Vol. 175, 1968, pp. 559-568
  • with Rowell Tunneling and strong coupling superconductivity , in RD Parks (Ed.) Superconductivity , New York, Dekker, 1969, pp. 561-613

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ McMillan Ground state of liquid He4 , Phys. Rev. A, Volume 138, 1964, pp. 442-451. Anderson called the dissertation a classic in his biography at the National Academy
personal data
SURNAME McMillan, William L.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McMillan, William Laughlin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Little rock
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 1984