The Life and Science of Anthony J. Leggett: A Conference and Memorial :: Program
Friday, Oct. 9th 2026
8:50 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. Opening remarks by Eduardo Fradkin
Session 1: Superfluid Helium-3
Chair: David Ceperley (Illinois)
9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. William Halperin (Northwestern), "Superfluid 3He Science and Serendipity: a legacy of Tony Leggett." [VIDEO]
9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Séamus Davis (Oxford/Cork), "Topological Superfluidity <-> Topological Superconductivity." [VIDEO]
Coffee Break
Chair : Taylor Hughes (Illinois)
10:45 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Gordon Baym (Urbana-Champaign), "A few quantum mechanics puzzles for Tony." [VIDEO]
11:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. Peter Schiffer (Princeton), "Early experiments on the nucleation of the AB transition in 3He: Baked Alaska and beyond." [VIDEO]
11:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. Tin-Lun (Jason) Ho (Ohio State University) [VIDEO]
11:45 a.m. – 12:00 pm. Unveiling of a plaque honoring Anthony J. Leggett by Vidya Madhavan, Head of the Department of Physics.
Lunch
Session 2: High-Tc Superconductivity
Chair : Lu Chen (Illinois)
1:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Dirk van der Marel (Geneva, Switzerland), "Myth and math in phonon-mediated superconductivity." [VIDEO]
2:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. John Kirtley (Stanford), "Phase-sensitive tests of pairing symmetry in the high-Tc cuprate superconductors" [VIDEO]
Coffee Break
Chair : Eduardo Fradkin (Illinois)
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Panel: Present and Future of Superconductivity [VIDEO]
Andrey Chubukov (Minnesota)
Steven Kivelson (Stanford)
Long Ju (MIT)
Nigel Hussey (Bristol, UK)
Vidya Madhavan (Illinois)
Memorial
4:30 p.m – 6:30 p.m. Alice Campbell Alumni Center. Live-streamed here.
Saturday, Oct. 10th 2026
Session 3: Quantum Coherence, Dissipation and Quantum Realism
Chair: Barry Bradlyn (Illinois)
9:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Amir Caldeira (Campinas, Brazil), "Macroscopic quantum phenomena and related matters: A brief history within a decade, 1976 – 1986." [VIDEO]
9:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Angela Kou (Urbana-Champaign), "Superconducting qubits, how to maintain coherence in the face of dissipation." [VIDEO]
10:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Michel Devoret (UC Santa Barbara) [VIDEO]
Coffee Break
Chair: Bryan Clark (Illinois)
11:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Anupam Garg (Northwestern), "The Macrorealistic Inequality." [VIDEO]
11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Matthew Fisher (UC Santa Barbara), "Revisiting the Resistively Shunted Josephson Junction: From Quantum Dynamics to Classicality." [VIDEO]
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Panel: Present and Future of Quantum Computation [VIDEO]
Steven Girvin (Yale)
Chetan Nayak (Microsoft / UC Santa Barbara)
Wolfgang Pfaff (Urbana-Champaign)
Lunch
Session 4: BEC-BCS Crossover and Ultra Cold Atoms
Chair: Jim Eckstein (Illinois)
2:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Mohit Randeria (Ohio State), "Are There Bounds on the Superconducting Transition Temperature?" [VIDEO]
3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Fernando Sols (U Complutense, Madrid), "From quantum Andreev-Hawking radiation to spontaneous Floquet states and the time operator." [VIDEO]
Coffee Break
Chair: Pengjie Wang (Illinois)
4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Markus Greiner (Harvard), "Quantum Simulation of the Unknown: Observing Stripe- and Pseudogap Physics in the Doped Hubbard Model." [VIDEO]
4:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Ana María Rey (Boulder), "Pairing Games in a Cavity: Emulating BCS Superconductors with Light and Atoms." [VIDEO]
Banquet (6.30pm, Illini Union, by invitation only, all speakers invited)