Michael Stone

Professor

Ph.D., Particle Physics, Univ. Cambridge, 1976

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.

Other Activities

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.

For more information:

Course page and online notes for Phys508 "Mathematical Methods I"
Course page and online notes for Phys509 "Mathematical Methods II"
Michael Stone's Personal Webpage

Honors and awards:

• American Physical Society

Selected Publications:

• E. Ardonne, R. Kedem, and M. Stone. Filling the Bose sea: symmetric quantum Hall edge states and affine characters. J. Phys. A 38, 617-636 (2005).
• E. Ardonne, R. Kedem, and M. Stone. Fusion products, Kostka polynomials and fermionic characters of su(r + 1)k. Journal of Physics A (Mathematical and General) 38, 9183-9205 (2005).
• A. Garg and M. Stone. Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization of spin Hamiltonians. Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, (2004).
• M. Stone and R. Roy. Edge modes, edge currents, and gauge invariance in px + ip_y superfluids and superconductors. Phys. Rev. B 69, 184511-1-12 (2004).
• S. E. P. Bergliaffa, K. Hibberd, M. Stone, and M. Visser. Wave equation for sound in fluids with vorticity. Physica D 191, 121-136 (2004).