Michael Stone
Professor of Physics
Professor
Michael Stone
Professor Stone received his Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in 1976. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois as an assistant professor in 1981. He served as the Deputy Director for the Instite of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1992 until 1994. He serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Modern Physics B, Modern Physics Letters B, and Physical Review Letters. He was the divisional associate editor for Physical Review Letters from 1997 until 1999.
The main focus of Professor Stone's current research is the dynamics of vortices in superfluids and superconductors. He has resolved a decades-long puzzle about the fundamental mechanism of dissipation in superconductors by clarifying the motion of Abrikosov vortices under the influence of a Magnus force. Previously, he explored and clarified the extent to which topological constraints impose "anomalous" behavior on physical systems, such as superfluid liquid helium, and has linked such behavior to the Berry's phase. He has also greatly extended the range of models to which bosonization can be applied and has successfully extracted implications for physical systems. In addition, he has explored the "edge wave" states observed in experiments on the quantum Hall effect and has clarified their nature by linking them to one-dimensional chiral field theories. Professor Stone's contributions have been characterized by a combination of sophisticated mathematical formalism and deep physical insight.
Research Areas: theoretical condensed matter physics, statistical physics, mathematical physics, quantum field theory and its applications in condensed matter systems and particle physics
Description of Current Research
Applications of Field Theory to Condensed Matter Physics
This program is aimed at advancing the theoretical understanding of a variety of condensed matter systems, each involving many strongly coupled degrees of freedom. Attention is primarily focused on the following areas: electronic liquid crystal phases in Mott insulators; the quantum Hall effect; geometric phases and their condensed matter implications; superfluids and superconductors, including vortex motion in dirty systems, quantum critical behavior of magnetic impurities in -wave superconductors; vulcanized matter and the vulcanization transition; structural glasses and network-forming systems, glassiness of superfluid helium-three in aerogel, shapes adopted by large biological macromolecules, and static and dynamic properties of polysoap macromolecules.
Selected Publications
Ardonne, E, Kedem, R, and Stone, M. Fusion products, Kostka polynomials and fermionic characters of su(r + 1)k. Journal of Physics A (Mathematical and General) 38, 9183-9205 (2005).
Ardonne, E, Kedem, R, and Stone, M. Filling the Bose sea: symmetric quantum Hall edge states and affine characters. J. Phys. A 38, 617-636 (2005).
Bergliaffa, SEP, Hibberd, K, Stone, M, and Visser, M. Wave equation for sound in fluids with vorticity. Physica D 191, 121-136 (2004).
Garg, A and Stone, M. Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization of spin Hamiltonians. Phys. Rev. Lett . 92, (2004).
Stone, M and Roy, R. Edge modes, edge currents, and gauge invariance in px + ipy superfluids and superconductors. Phys. Rev. B 69, 184511-1-12 ( 2004).
