A theoretical physicist, Thomas Witten specializes in the study of polymers (found in Styrofoam cups), complex fluids (including paint and toothpaste), and aggregation phenomena (such as the way snowflakes clump together). Witten looks for mathematical laws that govern these unconventional forms of matter. His publications include Structured Fluids: Polymers, Colloids, Surfactants (Oxford University Press, 2004). Witten is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Physical Society. Other honors include the APS 2002 Polymer Physics Prize and serving in 2010 as the Lorentz Professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He joined the UChicago faculty in 1989.
Witten's research concerns collective mechanisms for creating spontaneous structure in forms of conventional condensed matter, such as polymer liquids, evaporating liquid drops, layer-forming surfactant micelles, and thin elastic sheets. All these materials, when subjected to structureless external forces, develop new forms of spontaneous structure at a fine length scale, such as the sharp folds of a crumpled sheet or the thin ring stain left when a drop of dirty fluid has evaporated. These new forms of force-induced structure often arise from fundamental mechanical properties, such as the competition between bending and stretching energy in an elastic sheet or between evaporative flows and capillary forces in an evaporating drop. They may arise from fundamental statistical properties, such as the randomness of a chain polymer molecule or the random, tenuous structure of a colloidal aggregate. In either case, the fundamental origins of the resulting structures mean that they can be used and manipulated in a wide range of material realizations independent of the specific properties of the materials.