Prize Recipient

Nicholas Read
Yale University

Citation:

"For theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems."

Background:

Dr. Read received his B.A. in Mathematics from Cambridge University in England in 1980. After a year of graduate study in Cambridge, he went to Imperial College, London, and received his Ph.D. for work in Condensed Matter Theory in 1986. In 1985, he came to the United States and was a postdoctoral researcher in Physics at Brown University and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the faculty of Yale University in 1988. Dr. Read has been Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Yale since 1995.

Dr. Read's research has been mainly concerned with strongly interacting quantum many-particle systems in condensed matter physics. His early work was on intermediate valence and heavy fermion materials, using methods of gauge theory and the 1/N expansion. He employed similar methods in the study of high T_c superconductors and quantum antiferromagnets. In the mid-80's, Dr. Read became interested in the quantum Hall effect. He worked on the composite-particle approach to the fractional quantum Hall liquids, and the half-filled Landau level. He also developed the relation of incompressible fractional quantum Hall states with conformal field theories. Dr. Read's recent work is concerned with disorder in noninteracting fermion systems, such as models of the integer quantum Hall effect, and its description via nonlinear sigma models with supersymmetry. He is looking for conformal field theories of the critical phenomena in these systems.

Dr. Read is a Fellow of the APS, and a past recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Selection Committee:

Andrew Millis (Chair)