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William Halperin and James Sauls awarded the 2017 Fritz London Memorial Prize

The London Prize is the premier prize in the field of low-temperature physics. It was first awarded in 1957 to Nicholas Kurti and since 1972 is awarded every 3 years at the International Conference on Low Temperature Physics, which is sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). The bylaws used by the Fritz London Prize committee were first drafted in 1972 by John Bardeen, winner of two Nobel Prizes and of the '62 F. London Prize, and have subsequently been updated. Other previous winners include theoretical physcists Lev Landau, Brian Josephson, David Thouless, Anthony J. Leggett, Alexei Abrikosov, Anatoli Larkin, and Pierre Hohenberg. Professors Halperin and Sauls share the prize with Professor Jeevak Parpia from Cornell University. They are cited by the London Prize Selection committee for their ``pioneering work on the influence of disorder on the superfluidity of Helium-Three".

More about the Fritz London Memorial Prize [cloned and edited from the Duke University website: [@Duke]

Fritz London by Edith London In 1972 John Bardeen established an endowment to Duke University for "the Fritz London Fund" with a portion of his second Nobel Prize for the microscopic theory of superconductivity. This was to provide support for the annual Fritz London lecture and for the London Memorial Prize, to be awarded at each international LT meeting. In 1994, a second endowment was created at Duke University from a) the balance of funds remaining from the LT20 Conference in Oregon, remitted by Russell Donnelly, and b) a gift from Horst Meyer. This second endowment is called "Fritz London Prize endowment" and is solely intended for the London Prize. Further gifts to this endowment were made in 2000, 2006, 2009 and 2012 by the Organizers of the LT22, LT24, LT25 and LT26 Conferences in Helsinki (Finland), Orlando (Florida, USA) Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Beijing (China)

Left: Oil on Canvas portrait of Fritz London painted Edith London in 1954 From the website on Hilde Bial-Neurath, Department of Germanics, University of Washington.

Below, Professor Sauls writes about his observations on their work.

``The work that Bill and I are cited for in the London Prize is based on a collaboration that began with the discovery in Bill Halperin's lab of a new state of matter in liquid Helium-Three (the light isotope of Helium) infused into a unique form of glass (SiO2) called silica aerogel. The latter is a remarkable material itself, a gossamer solid that is mostly empty space with a density that is only ~1/100 th that of everyday glass. As for the Helium liquids they are arguably nature's gift to physics, in large part because they exist in the liquid state down to the absolute zero of temperature. This fact provides us with a liquid whose properties in aggregate are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, i.e the Helium liquids are quantum liquids. Among the most remarkable states of matter are the superfluid phases of 3He, discovered in 1971 at Cornell by Doug Osheroff, David Lee and Bob Richardson. That was a landmark discovery as the superfluid phases of 3He are the realization of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer's theory of superoconductivity in a quantum liquid. That discovery led to the Nobel prize to the discoverers, and to Anthony J. Leggett for the theory that led to their identification as BCS condensates.

The discovery of superfluidity of 3He confined within silica aerogel was unexpected. Indeed if you had asked me before 1995 I would have been very skeptical because the superfluid state of Helium-Three is very fragile, and most theorists working on quantum liquids, particularly Helium-Three, likely would have said that the complex structure of a random solid like aerogel glass would destroy the quantum correlations that give rise to superfluidity in Helium-Three. So, the disocvery by Bill's group using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, and the independent discovery by Jeevak Parpia's group at Cornell using a mechanical oscillator to directly measure the superfluid mass flow was a profound and unexpected disovery.

Bill Halperin's Lab and my theory group have had over the years a number of theory-experimental collaborations, and this award recognizes the progress we made in understanding the stability and sensitivity of the superfluid state of Helium-Three when the liquid has to "wind its way" through a torturous, random maze of solid silica. Theoretically, the robustness of the quantum state in the presence of scattering by a random network of silica is based on the ability of the quantum correlations responsible for superfluidity to adjust to the open regions in the random solid.

I will try an analogy which is a simplification but perhaps captures what is remarkable about the superfluid state of Helium-Three in a random solid.

Imagine the particles of Helium as cars on an 8-lane interstate. When the density cars gets large enough small changes in speed to avoid collisions - "near collisions'' - lead to a slow down of the flow, eventually to gridlock. That is the highly viscous state of a normal liquid. But, if we could install in each particle a communication device to lock the speed and distance of each particle to its neighbors so that the motion is coherent among all its neighbors, and that coherence applies to each and every particle, then the stream can flow bumper to bumper without collisions, slow down or friction. That is the superfluid state.

Now imagine that there are randomly placed barriers through out the superhighway. A collision with a barrier would be a disaster. The solution is to give up some of the particles and localize them in the vicinity of every barrier, and equip these localized particles with the same communication device as the flowing particles. These "lookout particles'' protect the superflow by communicating the information about the random barriers to the flowing particles. The superfluidity is only destroyed when there is a sufficient density of barriers that it traps all the particles. So, that is my classical analogy of the quantum state of superfluidity in a random solid, and the "communication device" is called "phase coherence" or "quantum coherence" in the quantum theory, and the "lookout particles" are called Andreev bound states.''


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