Deeply sad to hear of Professor Peter Littlewood (Trinity 1973) passing away on 15 June 2026.
Peter Littlewood matriculated at Trinity 1973, was Senior Scholar at Trinity College Cambridge (1974-1976), completed his PhD at the Cavendish lab with Volker Heine in 1980, and elected Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge in 1997, when he returned from Bell Labs to Cambridge as Professor of Physics at the Cavendish (TCM Group, which he later headed), and from 2005 to 2011, Peter was Head of the Cavendish. Later he was Director of Argonne National Laboratory and Professor and Chair of Physics at the University of Chicago, and executive founding chairman of the Faraday Institution (“powering Britain’s battery revolution”).
Peter worked on superconductivity and superfluids, strongly correlated electronic materials, collective dynamics of glasses, density waves in solids, neuroscience, and applications of materials for energy and sustainability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Littlewood
https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/news/professor-peter-littlewood-1955-2026
Personally, much of my time at Trinity and the Cavendish overlapped with Peter Littlewood’s time, and I owe much gratitude for many discussions with Peter over the years, most recently our Trinity Japan video discussion on 1 February 2023.
Peter Littlewood: video discussion with Trinity Japan on “The transition to renewable energy”
Peter Littlewood very kindly agreed to hold a video discussion on “The transition to renewable energy” with Trinity in Japan on 1 February 2023, which you can watch on YouTube here:
Photograph copyright notice: Professor Peter Littlewood, Director, Argonne National Laboratory at a lecture at LCN. 23 September 2016, 16:36:29. Source Flickr. Licensing. This image, originally posted to Flickr, was reviewed on 29 April 2017 by the administrator or reviewer Daphne Lantier, who confirmed that it was available on Flickr under the stated license on that date. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Professor_Peter_Littlewood,_Director,_Argonne_National_Laboratory.jpg
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