Aharon Kapitulnik (born 1953) is an Israeli-American experimental condensed matter physicist working at Stanford University. He is known primarily for his work on strongly correlated electron systems, low dimensional electronic systems, unconventional superconductors, topological superconductors, superconductivity and magnetism, transport in bad metals and precision measurements.

Education and Career

Kapitulnik studied physics at

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

in Israel (BA 1978, PhD 1983). After completing his doctoral studies under supervision of Guy Deutscher on the physics of disorder he moved to

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

to work on polymers as a postdoc scholar in the group of

Alan Heeger Alan Jay Heeger (born January 22, 1936) is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Heegar was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for co-founding the field of conducting polymers a ...

UC Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

. In 1985 he joined the faculty of the Department of Applied Physics of Stanford University where he became a Professor Applied Physics and Physics in 1994. At Stanford Kapitulnik formed a close collaboration with Theodore Geballe and Malcolm Beasley which is known collectively as the "KGB group". Many of its graduates went on to establish successful academic careers in US and around the world.

Awards

Kapitulnik is the Theodore and Sydney Rosenberg Professor in Applied Physics at Stanford University and the Sackler Professor by Special Appointment at Tel Aviv University. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was awarded the 2015

Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize is an annual award given by the American Physical Society "to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics." It was endowed by AT&T Bell Lab ...

of the American Physical Society for the "discovery and pioneering investigations of the superconductor-insulator transition, a paradigm for quantum phase transitions" and 2009 Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes Prize for "seminal studies of time-reversal-symmetry breaking effects in unconventional superconductors using magneto optics".

References

1953 births Living people Stanford University faculty 21st-century American physicists Tel Aviv University alumni Academic staff of Tel Aviv University Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Physical Society Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize winners {{physicist-stub