Duncan Haldane

Professor Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane FRS, known as F. Duncan Haldane, (m. 1970) is a British physicist, who is currently Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at the physics department of Princeton University, and a Distinguished Visiting Research Chairat Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

He was born on 14 September 1951 and was educated at St Paul's School, London, before reading Natural Sciences at Christ's College. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a PhD in 1978 for research supervised by Philip Warren Anderson.

Haldane went on to work as a physicist at Institut Laue–Langevin in France between 1977 and 1981, before joining the University of Southern California. He is well-known for a wide variety of fundamental contributions to condensed matter physics including the theory of Luttinger liquids, the theory of one-dimensional spin chains, the theory of fractional quantum hall effect, exclusion statistics, entanglement spectra and much more.

Haldane was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) in 1992; a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1986) and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1996) (UK); a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2001). He was also awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1993); Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow (1984–88); Lorentz Chair (2008), Dirac Medal (2012) and Doctor Honoris Causae of the Université de Cergy-Pontoise (2015).

Most notably, he won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David J. Thouless and John Michael Kosterlitz, 'for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.'