Few explorers have delved into stranger worlds than the three newest Nobel Laureates, who just won this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. These eminent physicists have been honored for their work on some the most exotic states of matter, making sense of its fundamental mysteries and opening doors for today’s era of exploration and development for new materials like topological metals, insulators, and superconductors.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences jointly awarded the prize with one half going to David J. Thouless, of the University of Washington, and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane, of Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.” If that sounds abstract to you, you’re not alone: The winners’ achievements were so esoteric that one committee member sought to demonstrate them using a host of breakfast breads.
Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz work in a surreal part of the physical world that might be described as “the flatlands.” This world is found on the surfaces of matter, or inside layers so thin that they are essentially two-dimensional; in fact, some of Haldane's work focuses on threads so thin that they are basically one-dimensional. Here, matter takes some of its strangest forms.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the scientists revealed secrets of the strange forms found in this realm, including superconductors, superfluids and thin magnetic film. This morning, Stockholm University physicist Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, explained the elegant mathematical concept they used for the prize-winning discoveries using a cinnamon bun, a bagel and a pretzel.
Topology is a system of mathematics that focuses on properties which change only by well-defined increments. In Hansson's breakfast food example, what's important is that the bun has no hole, the bagel has one hole and the pretzel has two holes. “The number of holes is what the topologist would call a topological invariant,” Hansson explained at the news conference. “You can't have half a hole, or two and two-thirds of a hole. A topological invariant can only have integer numbers.”
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