Laughlin, Robert

Bob is a Nobel Laureate in Physics (1998). Specializing in condensed matter physics, he is Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He is the author of A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, which argues controversially that emergence should replace reductionism as a core scientific paradigm. His current research is primarily high-temperature superconductivity theory. Recent work includes studies of doped Mott insulators, computation spectroscopic quantities -- optical conductivity, magnetic susceptibility, photoemission -- from first principles, and development of new mathematical methods based on his Nobel-winning work (i.e., the fractional quantum Hall effect). These include the use of condensed matter theories, the use of quasi-particles carrying fractional quantum numbers, and the application of conventional Feynman rules to systems containing both. Other interests include the theory of metals, localization, and quantum chaos.