Boris Altshuler

Boris Leonidovich Altshuler (, born 27 January 1955, Leningrad, USSR) is a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University. His specialty is theoretical condensed matter physics.

Education and career Altshuler attended State Secondary School 489 in Saint Petersburg. He received his diploma in physics from Leningrad State University in 1976. Altshuler continued on at the Leningrad Institute for Nuclear Physics, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in physics in 1979. Altshuler stayed at the institute for the next ten years as a research fellow.

In 1989, Altshuler joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there, he received the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (now called the Agilent Physics Prize) and became a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Research Altshuler's contributions to condensed matter physics are broad and manifold. He is particularly famous for his work on disordered electronic systems, where he was the first to calculate singular quantum interference corrections to electron transport due to interactions (Altshuler-Aronov corrections). Together with Aronov, he has also developed theory of dephasing in weak-localization. In collaboration with Boris Shklovskii, Altshuler developed the theory of level repulsion in disordered metals.

He has also significantly contributed to the theory of universal conduction fluctuations. More recently, Altshuler and Igor Aleiner have pioneered the new field of many-body localization, where they showed that an interacting many-body system may remain localized - a phenomenon descending from the famous phenomenon of Anderson localization. The latter achievement of Altshuler and Aleiner is widely regarded as a major milestone and many-body localization, they introduced, has now developed into a flourishing new field of physics. In 2016, the predicted phenomenon of many-body localization was observed experimentally by the group of Immanuel Bloch in Munich, Germany.

Awards and honors 1993: Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize 1993: Became a fellow of the American Physical Society 1996: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2002: Elected to the National Academy of Sciences 2003: Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society 2017: Dirac Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics, awarded by the University of New South Wales 2019: Simons Fellow 2022: Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society