Philip Warren Anderson: State

Philip Warren Anderson is American physicist. Explore interesting quotes on state.

Philip Warren Anderson: 26 quotes 0 likes

“… the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry.”

Philip Warren Anderson

Source: More Is Different (1972), p. 395

Law

“I learned, practically in my cradle (actually from Bill McMillan's thesis), that the ground state wave function of a system of bosons should necessarily be real and positive, a fact which made his early Monte Carlo simulations infinitely easier.”

Philip Warren Anderson

[Four Last Conjectures, 23 March 2018, arXiv.org, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11186] (section on "Overlap Currents")

Learning

“The oxide superconductors, particularly those recently discovered that are based on La2CuO4, have a set of peculiarities that suggest a common, unique mechanism: they tend in every case to occur near a metal-insulator transition into an odd-electron insulator with peculiar magnetic properties. This insulating phase is proposed to be the long-sought "resonating-valence-bond" state or "quantum spin liquid" hypothesized in 1973. This insulating magnetic phase is favored by low spin, low dimensionality, and magnetic frustration. The preexisting magnetic singlet pairs of the insulating state become charged superconducting pairs when the insulator is doped sufficiently strongly.”

Philip Warren Anderson

[The Resonating Valence Bond State in La<sub>2</sub>CuO<sub>4</sub> and Superconductivity, Science, 6 Mar 1987, 235, 4793, 1196–1198, 10.1126/science.235.4793.1196]