Nevill Francis Mott

Mott shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems. The prize was shared with Philip W. Anderson and John H. Van Vleck.

A Mott insulator is a material that band theory might predict to conduct electricity, but electron interactions make it insulating. The idea became important in condensed matter physics and strongly correlated electron systems.

Mott worked on how electrons behave in imperfect, disordered, and non-crystalline materials. His ideas helped explain conduction in systems that do not fit simple metal-or-insulator categories.

Mott held major posts in British physics, including at Bristol and Cambridge. He was Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge from the 1950s into the early 1970s.