David Thouless | |
---|---|
Born | David James Thouless 21 September 1934
Bearsden, Scotland |
Died | 6 April 2019
Cambridge, England | (aged 84)
Nationality | British |
Citizenship | United Kingdom |
Alma mater |
|
Known for | |
Spouse |
Margaret Elizabeth Scrase
(
m. 1958) |
Children | Three [4] |
Awards |
|
Scientific career | |
Fields | Condensed matter physics |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (1958) |
Doctoral advisor | Hans Bethe [3] |
Notable students | J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc) [4] |
David James Thouless FRS [1] [5] ( /ˈθaʊlɛs/; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019 [6] [7] [8]) was a British condensed-matter physicist. [9] He was the winner of the 1990 Wolf Prize and a laureate of the 2016 Nobel Prize for physics along with F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. [10]
Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland [11] to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster. [12] David Thouless was educated at St Faith's School then Winchester College and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge as an undergraduate student of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. [4] He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, [6] [13] where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor. [3] [14]
Thouless was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and also worked in the physics department from 1958 to 1959, giving a course on atomic physics. [8] [15] [16] He was the first director of studies in physics at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1961–1965, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom in 1965–1978, [17] and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980, [16] before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington [18] in Seattle in 1980. [17] Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons. [19] [20] [8] He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei. [19] [20] [8]
Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems. [8] For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei. [8] In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of ' topological ordering'. [8] Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices. [1] [8]
Selected papers [21] include:
Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979, [1] a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1986), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1995). [22] Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990), [23] the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize [24] of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016). [20] [8]
Thouless married Margaret Elizabeth Scrase in 1958 and together they had three children. [4] In 2016, Thouless was reported to be suffering from dementia. [25] He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84. [7]
All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." – "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
{{ cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link)
{{
cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (
link),
Los Alamos National Laboratory