Dale Van Harlingen, professor emeritus of physics and the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, died on July 20, 2024, two days prior to his 74th birthday. Van Harlingen served Illinois Physics as its 10th head of the department from 2006 to 2018.
Van Harlingen will be remembered by colleagues and friends for his gentle nature and joyful outlook, his easy ability to form connections with and energize people, and his deep love of the department he so gladly served and advocated for.
A renowned experimental condensed matter physicist, Van Harlingen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, elected in 2003, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected in 1999. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was a recipient of the 1998 Oliver E. Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics of the American Physical Society.
At Illinois, he received the 2016 Campus Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award. He was elected a Center for Advance Study Professor in 2005.
Van Harlingen retired from teaching in 2023, but continued to hold a research appointment up until his death. Van Harlingen contributed to our understanding of a broad range of superconductors, both classic and unconventional. Among the many techniques he employed in his laboratory, he is perhaps best known for developing phase-sensitive probes based on Josephson and SQUID interferometry for measuring the pairing symmetry of unconventional superconductors. He also contributed to the development and use of scanning SQUID microscopy and related scanning probes and was a proponent of using noise spectroscopy to reveal dynamical information. More recently, his work looked at topological excitations such as Majorana fermion states in hybrid superconductor-topological insulator Josephson junctions.
Van Harlingen received a B.S. in physics in 1972 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1977, both from The Ohio State University. After a year as a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, England, he held a postdoctoral research position at the University of California, Berkeley for three years. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1981.