Steven Kivelson


Steven Allan Kivelson is an American theoretical physicist known for several major contributions to condensed matter physics. He is currently the Prabhu Goel Family Professor at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford in 2004, he was a professor of physics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is a son of Margaret Kivelson, and his father, Daniel Kivelson, was a professor of chemistry in UCLA.

Education and Career

Kivelson received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979, working with C. Daniel Gelatt, Jr. He spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he was an Assistant, Associate and Full Professor. In 1988, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2004, Kivelson joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he was appointed Prabhu Goel Family Professor of Physics in 2012.

Awards and Honors

He was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship in 1995 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. In 2012, he was awarded the Bardeen prize instituted by the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Research

Kivelson is one of the leading figures in condensed matter physics and has made important contributions to many areas in quantum condensed matter physics. He is most famous for his widespread works in the field of strongly correlated systems and superconductivity, particularly high-temperature superconductivity, in which, among other things, he is known for proposing early microscopic mechanisms of cuprate high-Tc superconductivity and phase separation effects, and for introducing the paradigm of electronic liquid crystalline phases in these and other strongly correlated systems such as the quantum Hall systems, and more recently for emphasizing the notion and significance of "intertwined orders" in these and other strongly correlated systems. He is also famous for early important works in quantum dimer models and resonating valence bond theory, for the first Chern-Simons field theory description of fractional quantum Hall effect and quantum Hall dualities, and other important problems in fractional quantum Hall physics. He has also made important contributions to the physics of polymers, fullerenes, glasses and supercooled liquids, and, more recently, to in iron-based high-temperature superconductivity and problems involving nematicity, charge orders and superconductivity in general.
Kivelson is noted for his mentorship of students and postdoctoral researchers, several of whom have gone on to distinguished careers of their own.