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posted by janrinok on Tuesday October 04 2016, @06:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the applause dept.

David J. Thouless, F. Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz split the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 was split, with one half going to David J. Thouless at the University of Washington, and the other half going to F. Duncan M. Haldane at Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz at Brown University. The Prize was awarded for the theorists' research in condensed matter physics, particularly their work on topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter, phenomena underlying exotic states of matter such as superconductors, superfluids or thin magnetic films. Their work has given new insights into the behavior of matter at low temperatures, and has laid the foundations for the creation of new materials called topological insulators, which could allow the construction of more sophisticated quantum computers.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physics-nobel-awarded-for-breakthroughs-in-exotic-states-of-matter/

Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016

It is great to note that their Wikipedia entries are already updated to include the 2016 Nobel Prize ...


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:15AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @12:15AM (#410410) Journal
    I was thinking that the Nobel committee might have chosen a few key members of the LIGO collaboration that managed to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves, the last remaining unobserved prediction of General Relativity. Well, they could still come up for next year's prize, after all, it sometimes takes years, even decades, before someone who has done clearly important work gets recognised for a Nobel, e.g. Frederick Reines got his much-belated Nobel only in 1995, for his work in discovering the neutrino way back in 1956. His colleague Clyde Cowan might have shared the Prize if he were still alive then (he died in 1974), and Reines almost didn't make it, as he himself passed away only three years later. It seems as well that the Nobel Prize in Physics this year is being awarded for decades-spanning work by Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz, who began working on topological phases of matter in the 1970s.
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