文档介绍：The American Institute of Physics,founded in 1931,has grown and prospered during the past 75 years. And sohas the field of condensed matter physics (CMP). Today,CMP is the largest branch of physics in the US and in mostcountries around the world. But the field’s stature has its ori-gins in the slow knitting together of a diverse set of special-ties that flourished in the early 20th century. Indeed, one canargue that solid-state physics did not exist in 1931—at leastin name. Only starting roughly in the mid-1930s did the termgradually e the familiar label attached to conferences,journals, and research groups. Not until 1947 did the Amer-ican Physical Society establish the division of solid-statephysics (DSSP).1The name change from solid-state physics to CMP wasalso gradual, motivated partly by physicists’desire to includethe study of materials like quantum liquids and liquid crys-tals, which have nonsolid phases but are neverthelessthought to lie within the research purview of work on , both names are used, although by the late 1970s thelabel CMP became somewhat official in the US when theDSSP became the division of condensed matter physics(DCMP). Many researchers also associate the field of materi-als science with CMP; when determining the size of the con-densed munity, people often include the mem-bership of APS’s division of materials physics with that of theDCMP.