The strange matter of the Nobel Prize in physics and the cinnamon bun

Three British scientists were awarded the Nobel prize for physics earlier today for groundbreaking work which is a little difficult to explain.

Even quoting the citation for the award to the trio – David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz – hardly clears matters up.

It says they won the Prize ”for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.”

Pretzel

At today’s announcement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Thors Hans Hansson used a bagel, a cinnamon bun and a Swedish pretzel to try and explain the groundgreaking work.

Holding the three food items aloft he said: “I have a cinnamon bun, a bagel and a Swedish pretzel with two holes.

“Now for us these things are different. One is sweet, one is salty, they are different shapes.

“But if you are a topologist there is only one thing that is really interesting with these things. The bun has no holes, the bagel has one hole, the pretzel has two holes. The number of holes is what the topologist would call a topological invariant.”

The work these physicists have done could now play a significant part in the development of quantum computing which opens the door for computer processing systems millions of times more powerful than today’s technology.

Superfluids

The Acadamy said of the Nobel Prize announcement: “This year’s Laureates opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states.

“Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter. Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics.

“Over the last decade, this area has boosted frontline research in condensed matter physics, not least because of the hope that topological materials could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers.”

London-born Prof Haldane, 65, now Professor of Physics at Princeton University in the US, said: “It is only now that a lot of tremendous new discoveries based on this work are now happening.”

Complex

Steve Bramwell, a physics professor at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, said the Nobel Prize was ‘richly deserved’ by the trio.

He said: “The behavior of the materials around us is extremely complex – the job of physics is to identify simple principles by which we can understand the material world and predict new phenomena.

“The ingenuity of Kosterlitz Thouless and Haldane has been to show how a large class of real materials can be understood in terms of the simple mathematical principles of topology.”

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