Duncan Haldane

Duncan Haldane (born September 14, 1951, London, England) is a British-born American physicist who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on explaining properties of one-dimensional chains of atomic magnets and of two-dimensional semiconductors. He shared the prize with British-born American physicists David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz.

Haldane received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Cambridge in 1973 and a doctorate in physics from the same institution in 1978. He worked as a physicist at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, from 1977 to 1981. He was an assistant professor of physics from 1981 to 1985 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and then worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, from 1985 to 1997. He was a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, from 1987 to 1990 and then went to Princeton University.

In the 1960s and ’70s much theoretical work had been done on chains of atomic magnets, specifically those with a spin of 1/2. It was assumed that those chains of atomic magnets with integer spins would behave the same way. In 1983 Haldane used topological techniques to show that the two types of chains were very different.

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Physics and Natural Law

In 1988 Haldane extended work that had been done on the quantum Hall effect by Thouless, who had explained why the electrical conductance in that effect changed in integer steps. In the quantum Hall effect, electrons were placed in a conducting layer between two semiconductors and subjected to a strong magnetic field. The electrons formed a type of fluid. Haldane showed that the fluid could occur in semiconductors even without a magnetic field. Such behaviour was first observed in 2013.