Nationality United Kingdom Fields Physics Name Ian Percival | Alma mater Institution University of London | |
Books Introduction to Dynamics, Quantum State Diffusion Awards Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics Similar People Michael Berry, Predrag Cvitanovic, Nigel Weiss | ||
Institutions University of London | ||
Ian Colin Percival (born 1931) is a British theoretical physicist. He is the Emeritus Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He is one among the pioneers of quantum chaos and he is well known for his suggestion in the 1970s about the existence of a different type of spectra of quantum-mechanical systems due to classical chaos. Numerical explorations performed by other researchers clearly confirmed this idea later. In 1987, he came up with Franco Vivaldi algebraic number theory of quadratic number fields on the counting of periodic orbits in discrete chaotic dynamical systems ( the cats figure of Vladimir Arnold). Later on, he worked on the basics of quantum mechanics and the measurement process. Together with Walter Strunz he suggested the properties of the quantum foam at the Planck scale, (similar to the movement of particles due to Brownian motion) in the wave function of an atom-beam interference.
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Awards
In 1985 he was awarded the Naylor Prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize, this is awarded annually by the Institute of Physics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.