"I am delighted with the award, excited about the prospect of interacting with the students and faculty and honored join the distinguished company of the other Phi Beta Kappa scholars," said Zurek.
Phi Beta Kappa scholars are a select group: Steven Chu, recently appointed director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and 1997 Nobel Prize winner is the only other physicist this year. Visiting scholars spend two days per campus meeting with students, participating in classroom lectures, and addressing the academic community at up to eight universities and colleges with Phi Beta Kappa chapters. Specific topics selected for discussion by Zurek include Probabilities in Physics: From Quantum Entanglement to Classical Ignorance and Randomness and Maxwell's Demon.
Zurek joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1984 as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow and led the Theoretical Astrophysics Group from 1991 to 1996. In 1996, he was named a Laboratory Fellow. Along with his groundbreaking work in quantum mechanics (he is well known for developing theory of decoherence and for the "no-cloning theorem"), his research interests extend to physics of information, astrophysics, cosmology and quantum computation.
In 1979, Zurek earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Texas in Austin - he will return there in February as Visiting Scholar - and received his master's degree in physics from Stanislaw Staszic Technical University in Krakow, Poland in 1974.
In addition to writing nearly 200 scientific papers, Zurek edited influential volumes Complexity, Entropy, and Physics of Information, and (with John Archibald Wheeler) Quantum Theory and Measurement.
Along with his new role as Visiting Scholar, Zurek is a foreign associate of the Cosmology Program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He was a member of the external faculty of Santa Fe Institute, where he has founded the Complexity, Entropy and Physics of Information network. Recently, Zurek co-organized and directed the Quantum Coherence and Decoherence Program as well as the Quantum Computing and Chaos Program at the University of California's (Santa Barbara) Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Complexity, Computation and Physics of Information Program at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and the Washington Division of URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.