Paul Chaikin

Paul Michael Chaikin ( born November 14, 1945 in Brooklyn ) is an American physicist who deals with solid-state physics, in particular soft matter.

Chaikin studied at Caltech with a bachelor 's degree in 1966 and in 1971 received his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in M. Anthony Jensen ( Alan J. Heeger and ) ( Probing many body effects with superconductivity ). From 1972 he was assistant professor and in 1980 professor at the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA). In 1983 he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and 1988 at Princeton University, as Henry De Wolfe Smyth Professor of Physics from 2001. In 2005 he retired and Silver was professor of physics at the Center for Soft Condensed Matter Research at New York University.

He dealt with various fields of solid state physics: superconductivity, magnetism, thermoelectricity, metal - insulator transitions, organic conductors, quasi- one-dimensional materials, thin metal films, colloids and colloidal crystals.

He was a visiting professor at the University of Paris-Sud (1978 /79), at the Institut Curie in Paris (1998/ 99) and from 1983 also at the Exxon Research Laboratories.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society ( 1984), the Institute of Physics (2004), the National Academy of Sciences ( 2004) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ( 2003). 1977 to 1982 he was a Sloan Fellow and 1997/98 Guggenheim Fellow.

He has been married since 1977 and has two children.

Writings

• With Tom Lubensky Principles of condensed matter physics, Cambridge University Press 1995