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History of RSB Interview: Michael Moore December 22, 2020, 8:00-9:30Am (EST)

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History of RSB Interview: Michael Moore December 22, 2020, 8:00-9:30Am (EST) History of RSB Interview: Michael Moore December 22, 2020, 8:00-9:30am (EST). Final revision: January 19, 2021 Interviewers: Patrick Charbonneau, Duke University, [email protected] Francesco Zamponi, ENS-Paris Location: Over Zoom, from Prof. Moore’s home in Manchester, England, United Kingdom. How to cite: P. Charbonneau, History of RSB Interview: Michael Moore, transcript of an oral history conducted 2020 by Patrick Charbonneau and Francesco Zamponi, History of RSB Project, CAPHÉS, École normale supérieure, Paris, 2021, 26 p. https://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.997eiv27 PC: Thank you, Prof. Moore, for sitting with us today. As we've mentioned ahead of time, the purpose of this interview is mostly to discuss the period during which replica symmetry breaking was formulated, which we roughly bound from 1975 to 1995. But to be able to talk about this, we first want to ask a few questions on background, if you allow. In particular, how did you get to be interested in physics, and then to pursue a PhD in theo- retical physics? MM: That's such a long time ago in my case. I was an undergraduate student in Oxford, and I really liked being there. To do a PhD was an easy way of stay- ing there. They offered in those days very generous scholarships, so there was no issue with money. I was useless at laboratory work, very clumsy, so I ended up doing theoretical physics. I started out being a many-body phys- icist, as it was called in the ‘60s. I was interested in topics such as superfluid helium-4 and things of that nature1. Only gradually did I move into stat mech and problems like critical phenomena. I became a postdoc in Urbana in 1967, at the time when John Bardeen was there2. He had two Nobel prizes, and somehow when you get two Nobel prizes it seems to unlock the funders’ purse strings. I was just one of 35 postdocs on his contracts. When I arrived there, I went to see the great man to ask him what he wanted me to do. He was incredibly shy for some- one who, at the time, was also president of the APS. He was so shy, he found it hard to tell me what I should be doing. So he said: “Come back tomorrow. I think I may have thought of something by then.” I went to see 1 See, e.g., M. A. Moore and R. B. Stinchcombe, “The superfluid density and the Patashinskiǐ-Pokrovskiǐ theory of liquid He near Tλ,” Phys. Lett. A 24, 619-620 (1967). https://doi.org/10.1016/0375- 9601(67)90650-0 2 John Bardeen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen 1 him the next day, and he said why don't you work on showing that you can't have superconductivity at a temperature of more than 35 Kelvin. What he had in mind was fiddling with a formula called the McMillan for- mula3, so that I could get an upper bound on the transition temperature for superconductors. Well, that project really didn't get very far, and I grad- ually drifted into critical phenomena, working mostly with Michael Wortis and his graduate student David Jasnow. Then having finished in Urbana, I returned to Oxford for two years where I worked mostly on ferroelectricity before moving to the University of Sus- sex as a lecturer. Tony Leggett4 was there. Shortly after I arrived, superfluid helium-3 was discovered, and I sort of drifted into studying that. No one knew what the pairing state was in the superfluid. Everyone hoped it was a p-wave paired superfluid, and there was some evidence that it could be that. There was a critical test of whether it was really p-wave pairing, and that involved measuring the nuclear magnetic resonance frequency shifts at the so-called polycritical point, at which point all the nasty many-body corrections would drop out from their ratio in the two superfluid phases and you get an unambiguous test of the nature of the pairing states. An experiment was done, and unfortunately what is now the accepted answer did not seem to be consistent with the experimental data. People like Da- vid Mermin5, myself, and others looked at alternatives to p-wave pairing. I looked at the f-wave paired superfluid state6. It was horrible. The Landau- Ginzburg theory of that has a 42 component order parameter and there are 14 Landau-Ginzburg quartic terms, all with unknown coefficients. One was trying to minimize the free energy and then work out the NMR fre- quency shifts to see which fitted the data better than p-wave pairing. Hav- ing worked on this problem for two years, and not found anything which really worked, it was discovered that the so-called crucial experiment had been done incorrectly. The corrected results worked very well with what people thought the superfluid helium-3 pairing state was all along. As Da- vid Mermin wrote to me—people wrote in those days, there were no email —“Well, we won't get our rewards on Earth, but perhaps in Heaven we'll get them.” So that's what I was doing. In 1976, Mike Kosterlitz7 came to Sussex. I re- member chatting to him after his seminar. He wrote two Hamiltonians on 3 W. L. McMillan, "Transition temperature of strong-coupled superconductors," Phys. Rev. 167, 331 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.167.331 4 Anthony Leggett: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_James_Leggett 5 David Mermin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._David_Mermin 6 G. Barton and M. A. Moore, “The likelihood of f-wave pairing in superfluid 3He,” J. Phys. C 8, 970 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1088/0022-3719/8/7/014 7 Michael Kosterlitz : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Michael_Kosterlitz 2 the board: one was the Edwards-Anderson Hamiltonian8, the other was the Mattis Hamiltonian9. He was asking me why would the Edwards-An- derson model be any better than the Mattis model? Or whether it would even be different? I had never seen either of these Hamiltonians before. We just had a desultory conversation, but that was the first time I ever heard about spin glasses. FZ: Why were the Hamiltonians on the board? MM: [0:07:03] He was trying to interest me in this problem, because back in Birmingham he and Thouless had been worrying about spin glasses. FZ: So he came to you, I understand. He wrote the Hamiltonians on the board. MM: [0:07:13] Yes. You know how you chat after seminars. He was telling me about this problem by way of conversation. Now, if we had worked at it harder we might have discovered things like frustration and so on. As I was hearing about spin glasses for the first time, I wasn't really highly moti- vated to spend a lot of time on it. About that time, Tony Leggett was offered the job of Professor of Theoret- ical Physics in Manchester, which had become vacant because Sam Ed- wards had moved to Cambridge. I remember when he was offered the job, some of us took Tony to the pub one evening and gave him thousands of good reasons why he shouldn't leave and go to Manchester. He eventually declined the offer of a job there. The job was readvertised, and I applied for it. I was duly offered it. I noticed my colleagues in Sussex didn't really try that hard to get me to stay there! I took the job to Manchester, but before I went there, while I was still at Sussex, I had a message from Sam Edwards saying that he would like to meet me. He was curious to know who had been appointed in his place in Manchester. I had never met Sam until that moment, and so I was quite keen to meet him. He invited me to his London club, the Athenaeum—one of these London dining clubs10—for lunch. I went up on the train from Sussex to London, but it just so happened the French president Giscard [d’Estaing] chose that day to make a state visit to London11. That involved him flying into Gatwick Airport, and out of security 8 S. F. Edwards and P. W. Anderson, “Theory of spin glasses,” J. Phys. F 5, 965-74 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1088/0305-4608/5/5/017 9 Daniel C. Mattis, “Solvable spin systems with random interactions,” Phys. Lett. A 56, 421-422 (1976). 10 Athenaeum Club, London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenaeum_Club,_London 11 Valéry Giscard d'Estaing visited the UK in late June 1976, then the first state visit by a French president in 16 years. 3 concerns all the trains which went through Gatwick Airport were stopped. So I was just stuck for an hour and a half on a non-moving train, and I missed my lunch appointment with Sam as a consequence. (In those days without mobile phones I couldn't communicate to Sam that I was not going to be there.) Sam rearranged the lunch meeting, and before then it struck me: “What could we talk about?” So I looked at his paper with Anderson on spin glasses. That was really the first time that I had looked at a paper on spin glasses. It turned out I needn’t have bothered because we just gos- siped at lunch. Spin glasses were never mentioned on that occasion. Over the years, I kept meeting him—back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s—and he would shake his head about spin glasses.
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