Quick Facts
VirgoBiography
Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane FRS (born 14 September 1951), known as F. Duncan Haldane, is a British born physicist who is Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at the physics department of Princeton University, and a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics with David J. Thouless and John Michael Kosterlitz.
Education
Haldane was educated at St Paul's School, London and Christ's College, Cambridge where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a PhD in 1978 for research supervised by Philip Warren Anderson.
Career and research
Haldane worked as a physicist at Institut Laue–Langevin in France between 1977 and 1981, before joining the University of Southern California. 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.
As of 2011 he is developing a new geometric description of the fractional quantum Hall effect that introduces the "shape" of the "composite boson", described by a "unimodular" (determinant 1) spatial metric-tensor field as the fundamental collective degree of freedom of Fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) states. This new "Chern-Simons + quantum geometry" description is a replacement for the "Chern-Simons + Ginzburg-Landau" paradigm introduced c.1990. Unlike its predecessor, it provides a description of the FQHE collective mode that agrees with the Girvin-Macdonald-Platzman "single-mode approximation".
Awards and honours
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 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); Doctor Honoris Causae of the Université de Cergy-Pontoise (2015)and Nobel Prize in Physics (2016).
Personal life
Haldane is a British citizen and United States permanent resident. Haldane and his wife, Odile Belmont, live in Princeton, New Jersey.