The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has selected Alexei A. Abrikosov of Argonne National Laboratory, Vitaly L. Ginzburg of the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, and Anthony J. Leggett of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to receive the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. The trio is being recognized for their “pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids.” It is not the first Nobel prize to honor such theoretical work. Medals have previously gone to Lev Landau, who contributed to the understanding of 4He superfluidity, and to John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer, who together offered a microscopic theory of low-temperature superconductivity (the BCS theory).
The current Nobel Prize recognizes other key contributions to this body of work. In 1950, seven years before the BCS theory appeared, Ginzburg, together with Landau, formulated a phenomenological, or macroscopic, treatment of the superconducting state. That treatment remains a...
