David J. Thouless

David J. Thouless, 1995

David James Thouless (born September 21, 1934 in Bearsden , Scotland , † April 6, 2019 in Cambridge ) was a British theoretical physicist and winner of the Wolf Prize . In 2016 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics (together with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz ) for research on the theory of topological phases of matter .

life and career

Thouless made 1955 his Bachelor Accounts at the University of Cambridge , received his doctorate in 1958 at Cornell University under Hans Bethe and was followed in 1958/59 as a postdoc in Berkeley ( Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ), and from 1959 to 1961 at the Birmingham University at Rudolf Peierls . 1961 to 1965 he was a lecturer at Cambridge University. From 1965 to 1978 he was Professor of Mathematical Physics in Birmingham, was Professor at Queen's University (Kingston) in 1978 , before becoming Professor of Applied Science at Yale University in 1979/1980 and Professor of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980 . From 1988 to 1998 he was a Uehling Distinguished Scholar there . Since 2003 he has been Professor Emeritus there . 1983 to 1985 he was a Royal Society Research Fellow and Professor at Cambridge University.

plant

Thouless made many important contributions to condensed matter theory and many-body theory . During his time in Birmingham, he used mathematical means to investigate the nature of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions in the XY model , which are examples of topological phase transitions (transitions between two disorder phases, one of which is generated by the formation of topological vortex excitations). He also dealt with the Anderson localization of electrons in disordered solids and with spin glasses . From the 1980s he worked a. a. with quantized vortex excitations in superfluids and superconductors and the quantum Hall effect . In the early 1960s, he also dealt with collective excitations in atomic nuclei and with the theory of nuclear matter.

A work by Thouless, Mahito Kohmoto, M. P. Nightingale and M. den Nijs from 1982 identified a topological invariant in the integer quantum Hall effect (the TKNN invariant) (in a simplified model without interaction of the electrons with one another), which explains the Provides stability of the effect. The TKNN number is an integer that gives the quantized Hall conductivity for each band and can be expressed as an integral of the Bloch wave functions over the magnetic Brillouin zone . It corresponds topologically to the first Chern class of a U (1) - the fiber bundle . Topological phases in solids became topical in 2005 with the introduction of topological insulators by Charles L. Kane and Shoucheng Zhang , which were also observed experimentally. ${\displaystyle n}$ ${\displaystyle \sigma _{xy}={\frac {ne^{2}}{h}}}$

Honors and memberships

Thouless was a Fellow of the Royal Society , Fellow of the American Physical Society , Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and since 1995 a member of the US National Academy of Sciences . He received the Maxwell Medal in 1973 , the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1990 , the Dirac Medal in 1993 , the Holweck Prize , the Fritz London Memorial Prize (1984), the Lars Onsager Prize in 2000 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016 with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for the theoretical discoveries of the topological phase transitions and phases of matter.

In 1986 he received a Sc.D. Cambridge University.

Private

In 1958 he married Margaret Scrase. He had two sons and a daughter with her.

Fonts

• Quantum mechanics of many-particle systems . 1961, German quantum mechanics of many-body systems . BI university paperback, 1961
• Topological quantum numbers in non relativistic physics . World Scientific 1998
• with John M. Kosterlitz : Ordering, metastability and phase transitions in 2 dimensional systems . In: Journal of Physics C . Volume 6, 1973, p. 1181
• Condensed matter physics in less than 3 dimensions . In: Davies: The new physics . 1990
• Introduction to localization . In: Physics Reports . Volume 67, 1980, Les Houches Lectures
• Topological considerations . In: Prange and Girvin (eds.): The Quantum Hall Effect . Springer 1990

literature

• Andrea Taroni: David J. Thouless (1934-2019). In: Nature . Volume 569, 2019, p. 193, doi: 10.1038 / d41586-019-01424-y
• Marcel den Nijs: David Thouless (1934-2019). In: Science . Volume 364, No. 6443, 2019, p. 835, doi: 10.1126 / science.aax9125

Web links

Commons : David Thouless  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the award ceremony 2016 to David Thouless
• DJ Thouless. In: Physics History Network. American Institute of Physics
• David Thouless profile in the LANL Daily News Bulletin ( August 25, 2004 memento in the Internet Archive )
• 2000 Lars Onsager Prize Recipient. David James Thouless, University of Washington (American Physical Society)
• DJ Thouless, Ping Ao, Qian Niu, MR Geller, C. Wexler: Quantized Vortices in Superfluids and Superconductors . 1997, arxiv : cond-mat / 9709127 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ David J. Thouless: Facts. In: Nobelprize.org. Retrieved April 9, 2019 . 
2. ↑ D. J. Thouless, M. Kohmoto, M. P. Nightingale, M. den Nijs: Quantized Hall Conductance in a Two-Dimensional Periodic Potential. In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 49, 1982, p. 405
3. ↑ Pamela Kalte u. a. American Men and Women of Science. Thomson Gale 2004