A. Brooks Harris

In 2007 he received the Lars Onsager Prize for his contributions to the statistical physics of disordered systems, especially for the development of the Harris criterion. From 1967 to 1969 he was Sloan Fellow and in 1972/73 a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1989 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Upon receiving the Lars Onsager Prize, Harris wrote in 2007:

He was a visiting professor at University of British Columbia in 1976, at the University of Oxford in 1973, 1986, and 1994, at Tel Aviv University in 1987 and 1995, and at McMaster University in 2005. He was visiting scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in 1974 and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2002.

In 1973 he developed at Oxford the Harris criterion, which indicates the extent to which the critical exponents of a phase transition are modified by a small amount of randomness (e.g., defects, dislocations, or impurities). Such impurities "smear" the phase transition and lead to local variations in the transition temperature. Let d {\displaystyle d} denote the spatial dimension of the system and let ν {\displaystyle \nu } denote the critical exponent of correlation length. The Harris criterion states that if

Harris has been married to Peggy since 1958 and has three children, eight grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.

Harris was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard University with bachelor's degree in 1956, master's degree in 1959, and PhD in experimental solid state physics from Horst Meyer in 1962. Harris was in 1961/62 at Duke University to complete his doctoral thesis with Meyer and then was an instructor there from 1962 to 1964. During 1961–1964 at Duke University Harris retrained himself as a theorist in condensed matter physics and then spent the academic year 1964/65 as a researcher working with John Hubbard in the UK at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell Laboratory) near Harwell, Oxfordshire. At the University of Pennsylvania, Harris became in 1965 an assistant professor and in 1977 a full professor, continuing there until his retirement as professor emeritus.

Arthur Brooks Harris, called Brooks Harris, (born 25 March 1935) is an American physicist.