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David James Thouless (/ˈθaʊlɛs/; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019[5][6][7]) was a British condensed-matter physicist.[8] He was awarded 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.[9]
David J. Thouless | |
|---|---|
 David Thouless in 1995 | |
| Born | David James Thouless 21 September 1934 Bearsden, Scotland |
| Died | 6 April 2019 (aged 84) Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Alma mater |
|
| Known for | |
| Spouse |
Margaret Elizabeth Scrase
(m. 1958) |
| Children | Three[1] |
| 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[4] |
| Notable students | J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)[1] |
Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland [10] to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster.[11] 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,[5][12] where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.[4][13]
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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.[7][14][15] 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,[16] and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980,[15] before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington[17] in Seattle in 1980.[16] Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons.[18][19][7] He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.[18][19][7]
Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems.[7] For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei.[7] In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'.[7] Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.[2][7]
Academic papers
Selected papers[20] include:
- Kosterlitz, J. M.; Thouless, D. J. (1973). "Ordering, metastability and phase transitions in two-dimensional systems" (PDF). Journal of Physics C: Solid State Physics. 6 (7): 1181–1203. Bibcode:1973JPhC....6.1181K. doi:10.1088/0022-3719/6/7/010. ISSN 0022-3719.
- Thouless, D. J.; Kohmoto, M.; Nightingale, M. P.; den Nijs, M. (1982). "Quantized Hall Conductance in a Two-Dimensional Periodic Potential". Physical Review Letters. 49 (6): 405–408. Bibcode:1982PhRvL..49..405T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.405. ISSN 0031-9007.
Books
- Thouless, D. J. (1998). Topological Quantum Numbers in Nonrelativistic Physics. Singapore: World Scientific. ISBN 981-02-2900-3. LCCN 98009819. OCLC 38431218.
- Thouless, D. J. (1961). The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems (1st ed.). New York: Academic Press. ISBN 9780486493572. LCCN 61012282. OCLC 901492152.
Awards and honours
Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979,[2] 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).[21] Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990),[22] the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize[23] of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).[19][7]
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Thouless married Margaret Elizabeth Scrase in 1958 and together they had three children.[1] In 2016, Thouless was reported to be suffering from dementia.[24] He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84.[6]
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