- Person
- J. Michael Kosterlitz
- Lived
- b. 1943
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- British-American
The story
Michael Kosterlitz was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1943. His father, the biochemist Hans Kosterlitz, came from a Jewish family in Berlin and left Nazi Germany in 1934 after he was barred from being paid as a doctor and forbidden to marry his Christian fiancée. Michael grew up unaware of his Jewish origins, studied at Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1970 joined the University of Birmingham as a young researcher in particle theory.
Frustrated after being beaten to publication three times, he began asking colleagues for new problems and found David Thouless. At the time physicists believed that in a two-dimensional world, such as an extremely thin film, heat would scramble any order, so no true phase transition, like water freezing into ice, could occur there. Yet experiments on thin films of liquid helium hinted at superfluidity, flow without friction.
Kosterlitz and Thouless solved the puzzle with vortices, tiny whirlpools in the film. At low temperatures vortices exist only in tightly bound pairs spinning in opposite directions, which cancel each other. At a critical temperature the pairs abruptly come apart and free vortices destroy the ordered state. Because the change is governed by topology, the mathematics of properties that change only in whole steps, it was a completely new kind of phase transition. Kosterlitz then gave it an exact mathematical treatment, and in 1977 he and David Nelson predicted a universal jump in the superfluid density that experiments on helium films confirmed the following year. The Soviet physicist Vadim Berezinskii had reached related ideas, and the effect is called the BKT transition.
The transition turned out to be universal, appearing in superconducting films, magnetic layers, two-dimensional crystals and ultracold atom gases. More importantly, it introduced topology into the physics of materials. That idea grew into the study of topological phases of matter, including the quantum Hall effect used in resistance standards and the topological insulators and superconductors now being developed for low-power electronics and error-resistant quantum computers. Kosterlitz, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1978 and has worked at Brown University since 1982, shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.
Why it matters
The topological ideas Kosterlitz and Thouless introduced now guide the design of new quantum materials for future electronics and quantum computers.
About J. Michael Kosterlitz
Aberdeen-born son of a German Jewish refugee who, with David Thouless, discovered topological phase transitions, opening research on topological materials for future electronics. Nobel Prize 2016.
Sources
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016, Popular information NobelPrize.org
- J. Michael Kosterlitz, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- J. Michael Kosterlitz Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.