Introduction
David James Thouless FRS (/ˈdeɪvᵻd ˈdʒeɪmz ˈθaʊlɛs/, born 21 September 1934) is a British condensed-matter physicist. He is a winner of the Wolf Prize and 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.
Education
Thouless was educated at Winchester College and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, where Hans Bethe was his doctoral advisor.
Career and research
Thouless was a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 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, and professor of Applied Science at Yale Universityfrom 1979-1980, before becoming a professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1980. Thouless has made many theoretical contributions to the understanding of extended systems of atoms and electrons, and of nucleons. His work includes work on superconductivity phenomena, properties of nuclear matter, and excited collective motions within nuclei.
Thouless has made many important contributions to the theory of many-body problems. For atomic nucleii, he cleared up the concept of ‘rearrangement energy’ and derived an expression for the moment of inertia of deformed nuclei. In statistical mechanics, he has contributed many ideas to the understanding of ordering, including the concept of ‘topological ordering’. Other important results relate to localised electron states in disordered lattices.
Awards and honours
Thouless was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1979, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1995). Among his awards are the Wolf Prize for Physics (1990), the Paul Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics (1993), the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society (2000), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).