Duncan Haldane

Duncan Haldane was born in London and after attending St. Paul’s School, he studied at Cambridge University where he received a Ph.D. in 1978. His supervisor was the future Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson. Haldane has worked at Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, and the University of California San Diego. In 1990, Haldane was appointed as a professor of physics at Princeton University, where he remains to this day. With David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz, Haldane shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.”

Haldane is 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.

He has contributed to the Aspen Center for Physics as a General Member, Secretary, Trustee, and is currently and Honorary Member.