Three British physicists will share this year the eight million crowns (about 830,000 euros) that the Swedish Academy awards to the winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. Of that amount, David Thouless, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA). Will receive one half and Duncan Haldane (Princeton University) and Michael Kosterlitz (Brown University) will share the other.
The reason for which they have won the Nobel has been “for the theoretical discoveries of the topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. In simpler language, we could say that his research focuses on studying the exotic secrets of matter under quantum conditions . We speak of phase transitions to describe the changes that matter undergoes, such as when ice melts and turns into water or water evaporates and forms water vapor. But they have opened the door to an unknown world where matter exists not only in a solid, liquid or gaseous state, but in strange states . To all three we owe the theoretical discovery of new states of matter that go beyond the known limits set by changes in temperature.
His work focuses on understanding the behavior of matter at microscopic scales , where quantum laws rule and not the rules of the world that we can see with our eyes and that are familiar to us. As early as the 1970s, Kosterlitz and Thouless identified a completely new type of phase transition in two-dimensional systems in which topological defects play a fundamental role. With your research you can better understand the operation of some types of magnets and superconducting and superfluid fluids . They showed that superconductivity can happen at low temperatures and also explained the mechanism, the phase transition, that makes superconductivity disappear at high temperatures. The theories of Thouless and Kosterlitz have also served to understand the quantum functioning of one-dimensional systems at very low temperatures.
Then, in the 1980s, Thouless developed together with F. Duncan Haldane theoretical methods to describe phases of matter that cannot be identified by their symmetry breaking pattern. In this field, they explained the two-dimensional behavior of electronic gases using topological concepts. Many of these unexpected behaviors of matter under extreme conditions have been later confirmed by various experiments. The findings of the three British scientists open the way to developing innovative materials that may have applications in various branches of materials science and in the electronics of the future .
