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 University Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, or informally QM, and formerly Queen Mary and Westfield College) is a public research university in Mile End, East London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University of London. Today, ...

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

. 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, with Franco Vivaldi, he used the algebraic number theory of quadratic number fields to count the periodic orbits in generalized Arnold-Sinai cat maps. 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.

Awards

In 1985 he was awarded the

Naylor Prize The Naylor Prize and lectureship in Applied Mathematics is a prize of the London Mathematical Society awarded every two years in memory of Dr V.D. Naylor. Only those who reside in the United Kingdom are eligible for the prize. The "grounds for aw ...

. In 1999 he was awarded the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize by the

Institute of Physics The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a UK-based not-for-profit learned society and professional body that works to advance physics education, physics research, research and applied physics, application. It was founded in 1874 and has a worldwide ...

. He is a Fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

Books and articles

*Together with Derek Richards: ''Introduction to Dynamics'', Cambridge University Press 1982 *"Chaos: A Science for the Real World", in Nina Hall (editor), ''The New Scientist Guide to Chaos'', Penguin 1992 (also ''New Scientist'', 21 October 1989) *''Quantum State Diffusion'', Cambridge University Press 1998 *Together with Nicolas Gisin, "The Quantum-State Diffusion Model applied to Open Systems", ''Journal of Physics A'', volume 25, 1992, pp. 5677–91 *Published with P. Cvitanović, A. Wirzba: ''Quantum Chaos–Quantum Measurement'', Kluwer 1992 (in which by Percival: "Quantum Records") *Published with Michael Berry, Nigel Oscar Weiss: ''Dynamical Chaos'', Royal Society London 1987, Princeton University Press 1989 (Royal Society Discussion Meeting 4–5 February 1987) *"Chaos in Hamiltonian Systems", ''Proc. Roy. Soc., A'', volume 413, 1987, pp. 131–143 *"Integrable and nonintegrable Hamiltonian systems'" inNon-linear dynamics aspects of particle accelerators'', Lecture Notes in Physics, volume 247, 1986, pp. 12–36

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Percival, Ian C. 1931 births Living people 20th-century British physicists Chaos theorists Fellows of the Royal Society British theoretical physicists Academics of the University of London 21st-century British physicists