David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz win 2016 Nobel for work that may pave the way for quantum computers and other technologies

Three British scientists have won the Nobel prize in physics for their work on exotic states of matter that may pave the way for quantum computers and other revolutionary technologies.

David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz will share the 8m Swedish kronor (£718,000) prize announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm today.

The researchers were credited for their theoretical work on “topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. Together, their discoveries transformed how scientists think about materials.



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“I was very surprised and very gratified,” Haldane said in a telephone interview with the Nobel Foundation soon after he was named a co-winner. “It’s only now that a lot of tremendous new discoveries based on this work are now happening.”

“There’s great hope for these new materials to have a big impact,” he added.

Thouless, 82, who was born in Bearsden in Scotland and now works at the University of Washington in Seattle, was awarded half of the prize. The other half will be shared equally between the London-born Duncan Haldane, 65, at Princeton University, and Michael Kosterlitz, who was born in Aberdeen in 1942. He now works at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Kosterlitz was heading to lunch in Helsinki, where he is a visiting professor at Aalto University, when he heard the news. “I’m a little bit dazzled. I’m still trying to take it in,” he told the Associated Press. In his 20s when he embarked on the research, Kosterlitz said his “complete ignorance” was an advantage in challenging the established science because “I didn’t have any preconceived ideas.”

Exotic states of matter refers to unexpected electrical properties, such as superconductivity - the sudden ability of electrons to whiz through matter with zero resistance when a material is cooled below a set temperature. The scientists used abstract mathematics known as topology to overturn conventional thinking and explain these startling shifts in behaviour.



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In topology, materials are described as mathematical objects with set numbers of “holes”. Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel physics committee, drew on a number of edible props to explain. Holding up a bagel, a pretzel and a cinnamon bun, he said that while they varied in many ways, the only difference in the eyes of a topologist was the number of holes: the pretzel has two, the bagel has one, the bun has none. In the world of topology, changing from a normal conductor to a superconductor might be the equivalent of a bagel transforming into a bun.

“You never set out to discover something new. You stumble upon it and you have the luck to recognise that what you’ve found is something very interesting,” Haldane said. The dramatic transitions in the electrical behaviour of some materials was “so surprising” that it took Haldane a while to realise what he was observing. “But once you see it, you think why didn’t anyone else think of it before?” he added.



Sir Alan Fersht, master of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge University, was a student with Kosterlitz and found him an “exceptionally clever guy.” But his interests were much broader than mathematics and physics.

“He was an absolutely mad climber. He disappeared every weekend to go mountain climbing in the Peak District,” Fersht said. But Kosterlitz was not content with the trips. “He lived on Tree Court, and he built a traverse around the room where he would climb using his fingers and hanging on to the picture rail.”

Steve Bramwell, a physicist at UCL, said the prize was “richly deserved”.



“The behaviour of the materials around us is extremely complex. The job of physics is to identify simple principles by which we can understand the material world and predict new phenomena. This is a really difficult challenge because the average substance may contain a trillion trillion atoms, all interacting with each other,” he said.



“The ingenuity of Kosterlitz, Thouless and Haldane has been to show how a large class of real materials - particularly films and chains of atoms - can be understood in terms of the simple mathematical principles of topology - that is how the atoms are connected: a doughnut and a teacup have the same topology as they each have a hole in them.



“The breakthroughs of these three scientists allowed massive progress to be made in understanding and calculating the properties of many material systems. In my own case it opened up 25 years of research into magnetic thin films - which is what computer hard drives store information on. Many other scientists across many disciplines owe an equal debt to the theoretical insights of Kosterlitz, Thouless and Haldane.”



Prof Chris Phillips, of Imperial College London, said this year’s choice is “a real scientist’s prize”.

“The prize is normally given to someone who has made their discoveries a long time ago and has led to lots of applications. This is really recognising a scientific impact. It’s always nice when you see your own heroes are celebrated. These are people we, in the field, have hugely respected for a long time and it’s great to see them recognised.”

Last year’s prize went to physicists who solved a mystery known as the solar neutrino problem. Named after the Italian for “little neutral one”, neutrinos are ghostly particles that stream out of the sun and zip through almost anything in their path. Thousands of billions of them pass through each of us every second of the day without us noticing.

At first scientists thought that, just like photons, the particles were massless. But if that was the case, the best measurements of neutrinos from the sun were alarming. They detected only one third of the expected number, a potential sign that the sun would burn out sooner than thought. The prize winners, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald, discovered that neutrinos had mass after all, and can flip from one form to another as they fly through space.

Sir Martin Rees, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, and the Astronomer Royal, noted that all three awardees were Brits who had “defected” to the US in the 1980s, when university budgets were being squeezed by the Thatcher government. “The UK scientific scene is now much stronger than it was then - thanks in part of the strengthening of science on mainland Europe,” he said. “But there is a serious risk, aggravated by the tone of Amber Rudd’s deplorable speech today, that there will be a renewed surge of defections, weakening UK science and causing us to fail to recoup our investments over the lat 20 years.”



