David 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[4] |
| 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[3] |
| Notable students | J. Michael Kosterlitz (postdoc)[4] |
David James Thouless FRS[1][5] (/ˈθaʊlɛs/; 21 September 1934 – 6 April 2019[6][7][8]) was a British condensed-matter physicist.[9] 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.[10]
Born on 21 September 1934 in Bearsden, Scotland [11] to English parents, Priscilla (Gorton) Thouless, an English teacher, and Robert Thouless a psychologist and broadcaster.[12] David Thouless was educated at 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.[4] He obtained his PhD at Cornell University,[6][13] where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.[3][14]
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.[8][15][16] 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,[17] and professor of applied science at Yale University from 1979 to 1980,[16] before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington[18] in Seattle in 1980.[17] Thouless made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons.[19][20][8] He also worked on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.[19][20][8]
Thouless made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems.[8] For atomic nuclei, he cleared up the concept of 'rearrangement energy' and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei.[8] In statistical mechanics, he contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of 'topological ordering'.[8] Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.[1][8]
Selected papers[21] include:
Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979,[1] 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).[22] Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990),[23] the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize[24] of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).[20][8]
Thouless married Margaret Elizabeth Scrase in 1958 and together they had three children.[4] In 2016, Thouless was reported to be suffering from dementia.[25] He died on 6 April 2019 in Cambridge, aged 84.[7]
