For Physics, Another Nobel

In October, the UW Department of Physics celebrated its second Nobel laureate when Professor Emeritus David Thouless received the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics. Hans Dehmelt was the department’s first Nobel laureate in 1989.

“This award was a long time coming," colleague Marcel Den Nijs says of David Thouless, left. "He’s a brilliant scientist and a wonderful person.”

Thouless shares his Nobel Prize with F. Duncan M. Haldane of Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University, for research that overturned prevailing theories on how matter behaves in flat, two-dimensional environments. The scientists were able to describe new...