On 15th May at 7 p.m., physics Nobel laureate Michael Kosterlitz will electrify the audience at the TU Dresden’s Audimax in his public lecture "A Random Walk Through Physics to the Nobel Prize". 

The pioneering work of the 2016 Nobel Laureates in Physics, Michael Kosterlitz, David J. Thouless and F. Duncan M. Haldane kicked off the success story of topology applied to physical problems. This mathematical discipline plays an important role when it comes to characterizing new exotic materials, which made the Nobel committee award the physicists the Nobel Prize.

His father’s Jewish ancestry made Michael Kosterlitz’ family flee from Germany to Scotland where he was born in 1943. He attributes his talents in physics and mathematics to the necessity of compensating his unreliable memory. Due to his joy in chemical experiments, the school’s laboratory had to be evacuated more than once. In Cambridge, he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry and biochemistry, and discovered his passion for climbing which cost him quite a few hours of studies and academic successes. Despite his joy in the experimental discipline of chemistry, Kosterlitz chose – amongst others because of a red-green deficiency making problems in the chemical laboratory work – physics. After his doctoral degree in Oxford and an intermezzo in Italy, he applied for a job at the University of Birmingham where he met David Thouless – and the ideas about two-dimensional crystals, vortices and topology that led to his Nobel research.

Phase transitions make materials’ properties change drastically – for example the aggregate states, magnetic, electrical or elastic properties. These transitions are of special interest when it comes to surfaces or materials of few atomic layers. In these effectively two-dimensional systems, material properties fluctuate in an intensity that suppresses phase transitions. Michael Kosterlitz and David J. Thouless identified important exceptions: In certain cases, stable vortices form on the quantum level; a phase transition takes place when the interaction of these vortices changes significantly, as it does, amongst others, in superconductors, causing their electrical resistance to decrease. Topology makes it possible to calculate if such vortices can or cannot occur. This mathematical discipline describes the global properties of objects that remain unchanged even when the object is compressed, extended or distorted. Its application on physics could, as an example, make robust quantum computers be realized. Kosterlitz is now working as a Professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. On 15th May at 7 p.m., he will electrify the TU Dresden’s Central Lecture Hall’s audience.

Anyone interested in "Nobel science" is very welcome to join the public lecture. Please register at: tu-dresden.de/mn/nobel