David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz have won the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for their theoretical work on exotic states of matter.
One half of the prize was awarded to Thouless and the other half is split between Haldane and Kosterlitz. All three scientists were born in the UK and now work in the US.
Speaking over the phone to the press conference in Stockholm, Haldane, now a professor of physics at Princeton University, said: "I was very surprised and gratified. The work was a long time ago, and it's only now that a lot of tremendous new discoveries that were based on this work and have extended it in many ways are now happening.
"What it’s led to really is that [we now know] quantum mechanics can behave far more strangely than we could have guessed. What these discoveries show is that we have a long way to go to discover what’s possible."
Their work involved the use of a branch of mathematics called topology, which is interested in properties that change step-wise, rather than continuously.
In the 1970s Kosterlitz and Thouless showed that, contrary to popular belief, the property of superconductivity, where a material has zero electrical resistance at very low temperatures, could happen in thin layers. They also worked out why superconductivity disappears at high temperatures by working out how phase transitions happen in flat material.
Phase transitions happen when some matter (e.g. ice) changes into another state (e.g. water).
Thouless continued work in this area in the 1980s when he showed that topology was needed to explain why, at low temperatures and in strong magnetic fields, some materials conduct electricity and some do not.
Also in the 1980s, Haldane discovered that topology could be used to describe chains of certain kinds of magnetic atoms, but not others.
The scientists will collect their prize at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
from BuzzFeed - Kelly Oakes http://ift.tt/2dXvdn0
