David J. Thouless Explained

David Thouless
Birth Name:David James Thouless
Birth Date:21 September 1934
Birth Place:Bearsden, Scotland
Death Place:Cambridge, England
Citizenship:United Kingdom
Nationality:British
Field:Condensed matter physics
Thesis Title:The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter
Thesis Year:1958
Thesis Url:http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/745509629
Doctoral Advisor:Hans Bethe
Notable Students:J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)[1]
Children:Three

David James Thouless [2] (; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019) was a British condensed-matter physicist.[3] 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.[4]

Education

Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland [5] to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster.[6] 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.[1] He obtained his PhD at Cornell University,[7] where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.[8]

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.[9] [10] 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,[11] and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980,[10] before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington[12] in Seattle in 1980. Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons.[13] [14] He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.[13] [14]

Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems.[15] For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei.[15] In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'.[15] Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.[15]

Academic papers

Selected papers include:

Books

Awards and honours

Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979,[16] 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).[17] Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990),[18] the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize[19] of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).[14] [15]

Personal life

Thouless married Margaret Elizabeth Scrase in 1958 and together they had three children.[1] In 2016, Thouless was reported to be suffering from dementia.[20] He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84.[21]

See also

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Anon. 2016. BBC Radio 4 profile: Professor David J Thouless. BBC. London.
  2. Leggett . Anthony J. . 2022 . David James Thouless. 21 September 1934—6 April 2019 . Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society . 72. 337–358 . 10.1098/rsbm.2021.0049 . 247191023 . free .
  3. Web site: Physicist Thouless to give two talks at Lab . 4 October 2016 . bot: unknown . https://web.archive.org/web/20061015000324/http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/newsbulletin/2004/04/23/text04.shtml . 15 October 2006 ., Los Alamos National Laboratory
  4. Book: The international who's who 1991–92. 25 July 1991. Europa Publ.. Google Books. 9780946653706.
  5. News: Sturrock. Laura. Bearsden scientist is awarded Nobel prize in Physics. 6 October 2016. Kirkintilloch Herald. 5 October 2016.
  6. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/obituaries/david-thouless-dead.html David Thouless, 84, Dies; Nobel Laureate Cast Light on Matter
  7. PhD . David James. Thouless . The application of perturbation methods to the theory of nuclear matter . Cornell University . 1958 . 745509629.
  8. Book: Lee, Sabine. From Nuclei to Stars: Festschrift in Honor of Gerald E. Brown. 8 April 2011. World Scientific. Google Books. 9789814329880.
  9. Web site: UW Professor Emeritus David J. Thouless wins Nobel Prize in physics for exploring exotic states of matter UW Today. www.washington.edu. en. 7 April 2017.
  10. Web site: David Thouless. aip.org. 10 October 2016. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20161005130847/https://www.aip.org/history/acap/biographies/bio.jsp?thoulessd. 5 October 2016.
  11. Web site: Two former Birmingham scientists awarded Nobel Prize for Physics. 4 October 2016. University of Birmingham. 4 October 2016.
  12. Nijs. Marcel den. 2019-05-31. David Thouless (1934–2019). Science. en. 364. 6443. 835. 10.1126/science.aax9125. 0036-8075. 31147511. 2019Sci...364..835D . 206668153.
  13. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016. NobelPrize.org.
  14. Gibney. Elizabeth. Castelvecchi. Davide. Physics of 2D exotic matter wins Nobel: British-born theorists recognized for work on topological phases. Nature. 538. 7623. 2016. 18. Springer Nature. London. 10.1038/nature.2016.20722. 27708331. 2016Natur.538...18G. free.
  15. Web site: David J. Thouless Facts. Nobel Prize.org. October 13, 2020.
  16. Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20151117024634/https://royalsociety.org/people/david-thouless-12410/ . 17 November 2015 . Professor David Thouless FRS . royalsociety.org . London . Anon . 1979 . One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
  17. Web site: David Thouless . National Academy of Sciences Online . 9 October 2016 . https://web.archive.org/web/20161010125049/http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/67745.html . 10 October 2016 . dead .
  18. http://www.wolffund.org.il/index.php?dir=site&page=winners&cs=337&language=eng David J. Thouless Winner of Wolf Prize in Physics – 1990
  19. Web site: 2018 Stanley Corrsin Award Recipient. www.aps.org.
  20. News: Knapton. Sarah. British scientists win Nobel prize in physics for work so baffling it had to be described using bagels. The Telegraph. 4 October 2016. 24 September 2017.
  21. Web site: Professor David Thouless 1934–2019. 6 April 2019. Trinity Hall, Cambridge. 8 April 2019.

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