Three winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics have been announced. David Thouless from University of Washington won half of the prizes and the other half was jointly won by Duncan Haldane from Princeton University and J.Michael Kosterlitz from Brown University. These three laureates are from the UK. These three scientists regard the prize as one of the biggest achievements for them. Here are the reasons why they've won this year's prize.
The three laureates have shown the unusual behavior of matter. They have studied the unusual behavior of matter on the basis of critical and advanced mathematical methods. States of matter such as semiconductor, super-fluid and superconductor were the topics of their research. After revealing the research report, many people have gotten new hope of applications in electronics and material science.
They have discovered the strange behavior and states of matter, which only changes step-wise using topological concepts entirely based on mathematics. In 1970, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless stated that super-fluidity and superconductivity cannot happen in thin layers. They have also elaborated the mechanism how superconductivity occurs at low temperature and super-fluidity disappears in high temperature. They carefully explained the transition of phase of matter, which was a great achievement of them.
In 1980 Thouless started experimenting on the above mentioned statements to reveal another new side. He did the experiment with the help of electrically conducting layers in which conductance was measured carefully as integer steps. After this experiment he explained that integers are topological in nature. After revealing this result, Duncan Haldane started the research on this topic and he discovered how the topological concept was used and it helped to understand the properties of small magnets. Through the foregoing, these three laureates have completed their research work and finally won the prestigious Nobel Prize.
