David J. Thouless

David Thouless FRS
File:DavidThouless 1995 UW.jpg David Thouless in 1995
Born	David James Thouless (1934-09-21)21 September 1934 Bearsden, Scotland
Died	Cambridge, England
Residence	United Kingdom
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Fields	Condensed matter physics
Institutions	University of Washington University of California, Berkeley University of Birmingham Yale University
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA) Cornell University (PhD)
Thesis	The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter (1958)
Doctoral advisor	Hans Bethe
Notable students	J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)
Known for	Kosterlitz–Thouless transition Thouless energy Topological quantum numbers
Notable awards	Maxwell Medal and Prize (1973) Fellow of the Royal Society (1979) Holweck Prize (1980) Wolf Prize (1990) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1995) Lars Onsager Prize (2000) Nobel Prize in Physics (2016)
Spouse	Margaret Elizabeth Scrase (m. 1958)
Children	Three

David James Thouless FRS (/ˈθaʊlɛs/; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019) was a British condensed-matter physicist. 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.

Education

Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and psychologist and broadcaster, Robert Thouless, David Thouless was educated at 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. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.

Career and research

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. 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, and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980, before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980. Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons. He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.

Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems. For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei. In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'. Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.<ref name=nobelfacts/

Selected Publications

• J. M. Kosterlitz & D. J. Thouless, "Ordering, metastability and phase transitions in two-dimensional systems", Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics, Vol. 6 pages 1181-1203 (1973)
• D. Thouless, M. Kohmoto, M. Nightingale & M. den Nijs, "Quantized Hall Conductance in a Two-Dimensional Periodic Potential", Phys. Rev. Lett. 49, 405 (1982).
• Topological Quantum Numbers in Nonrelativistic Physics, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte Ltd, 1998
• The quantum mechanics of many-body systems (Pure and applied physics series), Academic Press, 1972

See also

• Berezinsky-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition
• Thouless energy

External links

• David Thouless profile in the LANL Daily News Bulletin
• David James Thouless, University of Washington: 2000 Lars Onsager Prize Recipient (Americal Physical Society)