Michael Moore (physicist)

Michael Arthur Moore (born 1943)^[2] FRS^[3] is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor of theoretical physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester where he has worked since 1976.^[2][4]

Moore was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1989.^[3][5]

Moore was born on 8 October 1943, the son of John Moore and Barbara Atkinson. He was educated at Huddersfield New College and Oriel College, Oxford. Whilst at Oxford he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1967 for research on Many-body theory supervised by W. E. Parry.^[6]

After his PhD he earned at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Between 1969 and 1971, he was a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. Between 1971 and 1976, he was a lecturer in physics at the University of Sussex.^[2][5]

Moore has published many papers in statistical physics covering a wide range of topics.^[3] His early research was on the application of scaling theories to magnetic spin systems and superfluidity, and contained a series of useful results on critical indices.^[3] He then applied renormalisation group ideas to polymer solutions and clarified the relationship of this approach to previous theories; a particularly interesting result concerned the retrieval of the Flory index under approximation schemes.^[3] After some work on critical behaviour on surfaces, he joined the (then) new spin glass field, and in collaboration with Alan Bray^[7] wrote a series of important papers both on replica symmetry breaking in these systems and on their properties as revealed by computer simulation.^[3] In particular, he is associated with the droplet scaling theory of the spin glass state. In recent years, Michael has extended this work to structural glasses.^[3]