| 1 | Name: | Dr. Zachary Fisk | |
| Institution: | University of California, Irvine | ||
| Year Elected: | 2010 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 106. Physics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1941 | ||
Following an undergraduate physics major at Harvard, I trained with Bernd Matthias at the then new University of California, San Diego, graduating in 1969. After a post doctoral year at Imperial College with Bryan Coles and a year as assistant professor at the University of Chicago, I returned as a research physicist to San Diego and spent the next decade in research on new superconducting and magnetic materials. In 1981, I went to Los Alamos National Laboratory as a staff member with the idea to study the f-electron physics of actinides from a materials driven standpoint. There followed the discovery of so-called heavy Fermion superconductivity in UBe13 and UPt3, the first examples known in this class of superconducting materials after their original discovery of in CeCu2Si2 by Steglich. These materials provided the first convincing evidence of a non-BCS and hence non-trivial superconducting order which has since been found in materials such as the high Tc cuprates. This research on superconductivity at the remarkably fertile boundary with magnetism has been my main research focus and has continued at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee (1994 - 2004) and then at the Universities of California at Davis and now Irvine. A long standing amateur interest has been investigating the Gallina Culture of northern New Mexico. These people occupied hundreds of square miles in canyons and on high mesas along the continental divide in small, often highly defensive, villages over several centuries before vanishing in the late 13th century. My interest has been in trying to understand the physical layout of sites, many of which are well removed from food and water sources. | |||