Former USC Dornsife professor wins 2016 Nobel Prize in physics

Former USC Dornsife professor F. Duncan Haldane has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for research he conducted in large part while a faculty member at USC from 1981-85.

Haldane, who is now a professor at Princeton University, relied on advanced mathematical models to win the prestigious award that he shares with David Thouless of the University of Washington and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University. The three scientists won the prize “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.” Their research into the bizarre properties of matter in extreme states, including superconductors, superfluids and thin magnetic films may have major applications in electronics, materials science and computing.

“(Haldane, Thouless and Kosterlitz) have ignited a firestorm of research, and although applications are still yet to come, I believe it’s only a matter of time before their research leads to advances as unimaginable to us now as lasers and computer chips were a hundred years ago,” said Laura H. Greene, president-elect of the American Physical Society.

“I was very surprised and very gratified,” Haldane told reporters by phone at a news conference in Stockholm on Oct. 4, the day he was informed of his Nobel Prize. “The work was a long time ago, but it’s only now that a lot of tremendous new discoveries are based on this original work and have extended it.”

F. Duncan Haldane pictured at home on the day of his Nobel Prize win with the whiteboard which he uses to explore and model his research. Photo courtesy of F. Duncan Haldane.

In an interview publicized by Princeton University on the same day, Haldane said, “My work was a kind of sleeper. It was a very theoretical thing. … It didn’t become such a big deal until my work got extended (by other scientists).”

Indeed, Haldane told USC Dornsife News that he initially had a lot of difficulty in getting his work published. It wasn’t until after arriving at USC Dornsife that the London-born physicist succeeded in publishing two landmark papers, both in 1983, that later established his reputation.

“It is very gratifying that work which was initially disbelieved as a bizarre prediction has blossomed into one of the foundations of new ideas on topological matter, entanglement, matrix product states, and much else,” Haldane said. “This prize recognizes the great current excitement in this field, and its roots which go back to 1981 when it and other new ideas such as Berry phases were emerging. The real prize for me is to have been fortunate enough to stumble on some of these ideas and help develop this field, but obviously I am also pleased by the Nobel committee’s selection.”

Haldane’s groundbreaking work, leading to the concept of the Haldane Gap, was first published in 1983 and came directly from research he conducted at USC Dornsife. 

 “While at USC, Duncan worked out the fundamental differences of quantum spin chains made of interacting atoms with effective integer spins versus half-integer spins of their relevant electrons,” said Stephan Haas, professor and chair of physics and astronomy. “The different underlying theories for these two cases highlight the importance of topological terms in correlated condensed matter systems.”

The paper Haldane published in the journal Physics Letters A in 1983 derived continuum models that explain the meeting place of normal matter and topological matter in effectively one-dimensional physical systems.

In an article published on Princeton University’s website, Haldane explained how this controversial paper bucked accepted opinions about magnets’ behaviour.

“At the time, it made a big stir because people said it’s nonsense, it has to be wrong,” he said. “It was blocked for publication, but I knew it was right.”

Haldane was eventually recognized for the research he presented in this paper with the American Physical Society’s 1993 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, which honors “outstanding theoretical or experimental” work, the Princeton University article noted.

Haldane, 65, received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, where he was also an undergraduate, in 1978. He began his research at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, before arriving at USC Dornsife in 1981. He stayed at USC until 1985 and during this period performed groundbreaking research on topological effects in low-dimensional quantum many-body systems.

“I was recruited to USC by Professor Kazumi Maki, whose work I greatly respected,” Haldane said. “The work on the spin-1 quantum spin chain was started as I was moving from the Institut Max Von Laue-Paul Langevin in Grenoble, France, to USC and brought to completion at USC. It was quite controversial, and initially rejected for publication because it was contrary to a conventional wisdom of the time. … Since then, starting with the quantum Hall effect discovered at about the same time, many more kinds of topological quantum matter have been found, particularly since the discovery of three-dimensional topological insulators about 10 years ago.”

In the intervening period since 1981, these discoveries have transformed the way we view the possible states of condensed matter, and how we analyze them theoretically, Haldane said. Following a proposal by Alexei Kitaev that even more exotic forms of topological quantum matter could be use to create a “topologically-protected” form of “quantum computation,” interest in this field has continued to grow.

After leaving USC Dornsife, Haldane joined Bell Laboratories before moving to the University of California, San Diego in 1986. There he published a third paper in 1988 that also contributed to his Nobel Prize. He left UCSD for Princeton University in 1990.

Hans Bozler, professor of physics and astronomy, knew Haldane well during his time at USC Dornsife. He described the future Nobel Prize winner as a quiet and unassuming man who let his work speak for itself.

“As an assistant professor, Duncan mostly worked out of his office by himself,” Bozler said. “His work was extremely complex, but I recall a number of evenings when he would show the spectrums of excitations coming from his simulations of his spin-chain models.”

Despite Haldane’s modest nature, his work swiftly gained recognition. He received a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship while he was at USC Dornsife in 1984.

“Duncan’s work is so important because it shows how different geometries — i.e., different spatial arrangements of quantum mechanical objects such as atoms — lead to fundamentally different physical properties,” Haas said. “For example, the low-temperature thermal response of quantum coupled spin chains may be either suppressed or enhanced, depending on whether there is an even or odd number of such chains coupled together.” 

On the nature of his discovery, Haldane added, “All these things are things that no one expects. You stumble over something and then you find the big picture after.”