Allan Griffin

Program :

Quantum Materials

Appointment :

Fellow

Institution :

University of Toronto

Country :

Canada

Allan Griffin is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Toronto.  He was born and raised in the Vancouver area. He received his B.Sc. (1960) and M.Sc. (1961) from the University of British Columbia, and his Ph.D. at Cornell University (1965).  His thesis was on the theory of gapless superconductors, under the supervision of Vinay Ambegaokar.  Dr. Griffin spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego(UCSD), working with Harry Suhl.  This was a golden period in La Jolla, and Allan’s fellow postdocs included T.M. Rice, S.K. Ma, C. Caroli and L.J. Sham.  He became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in 1967 and has spent his career there, taking mandatory retirement in 2004.  Over his career, Dr. Griffin has spent research sabbaticals at the KFA Julich (Germany), the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble (France), Kyoto University (Japan), the University of Trento (Italy) and was a JILA Fellow at the University of Colorado (U.S.A.).  

In the last decade, he has traveled widely giving lectures on the theory of ultracold atoms, and has been a short-term visiting professor at the ANU in Canberra (Australia), the Collège de France in Paris, and the University of Otago (New Zealand).  Dr. Griffin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2003), a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2004), and received the Bronze Medal from the Collège de France (2001).  He is the author of a monograph on Bose liquids (1993), the editor of a well-known book on Bose-Einstein Condensation (1995), and senior co-author of a new book "Bose-condensed Gases at Finite Temperatures" (2009), all published by Cambridge University Press.  As part of a new initiative dealing with ultracold atoms, Prof. Griffin was appointed as an Associate Member of the CIFAR Quantum Materials Program in 2006 and as a Fellow in 2008.

Dr. Griffin has published widely on the theory of collective modes in superfluid Helium 4, BCS superconductors and, in the last decade, trapped laser-cooled quantum gases.  In the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic gases, his work has emphasized the coupled motion of the condensate and the non-condensate atoms, which becomes important at finite temperatures.  He and his collaborators have derived the Landau two-fluid hydrodynamic equations starting from the existence of a Bose condensate.  Dr. Griffin was one of the first theorists to study the BCS-BEC crossover in trapped Fermi superfluid gases, which can now be accessed by using a Feshbach resonance to tune the interatomic interaction strength.  In the last decade, he has lectured at many summer schools and workshops around the world about the overlap between ultracold atomic gases and many body problems in condensed matter physics.