A. Peter Young

University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California ~Distinguished Professor of Physics. Research covers many areas in statistical and condensed matter physics. Known for ability to employ computational techniques in the service of fundamental questions. Early on, contributed to the development of the well-known theory of melting in two dimensions. Worked on elucidating the physics of spin glasses, producing two influential papers: one showing that the spin glass phase does not have complete ergodicity, and the second demonstrating critical behavior in a simple spin glass model. The latter was the first of many papers for which computer simulations were applied to the problem. Wrote the definitive review on spin glasses, still widely cited more than twenty years later. In the 1980s, contributed a computational study that complemented analytical theory concerning the two-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet. Subsequently, established important results about the superconductivity to insulator transition and the properties of vortex glasses in dirty superconductors. Recent work applies techniques from statistical physics to identify problems that could be efficiently solved by an eventual quantum computer. Fellow, American Physical Society. Recipient of the Maxwell Medal from the Institute of Physics (1985) and the Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society (2009).~