Steven Girvin


Steven M. Girvin is an American physicist, who is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and deputy provost for science and technology at Yale University. Girvin is noted for his theoretical work on quantum many body systems, such as the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Biography

Girvin was born in Austin, Texas in 1950 and went to high school in the village of Brant Lake, New York. He did his undergraduate education at Bates College and the University of Maine. He completed his PhD in physics at the Princeton University in 1977. Girvin worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Indiana University, Bloomington and the National Bureau of Standards and held faculty position at Indiana University, before joining Yale as a Professor of Physics. Girvin was awarded a bronze medal for superior federal service by the Department of Commerce while serving as a physicist at the Bureau of Standards.
Girvin's research focus has been theoretical study of collective quantum behavior in strongly correlated many body systems and their phase transitions,; he has worked on problems such as quantum Hall effect, superconductor-insulator transition, quantum spin chains and so on. He works with experimentalists Rob Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret on the engineering problem of building a quantum computer, and on developing a new "circuit QED" using superconducting electrical circuits. The group was successful in experimentally implementing two-qubit quantum algorithms on a superconducting circuit. Girvin co-edited the book "The Quantum Hall Effect", which has been translated to Japanese, Chinese and Russian.
Girvin, James P. Eisenstein and Allan H. MacDonald won the 2007 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for their "Fundamental experimental and theoretical research on correlated many-electron states in low dimensional systems"

Honors