Nicholas Read

Henry Ford II Professor of Physics, Professor of Applied Physics and Mathematics. Theorist studying strongly-correlated quantum systems, ranging from heavy fermion compounds and high-temperature superconductors to fractional quantum Hall states and quantum magnets. He made fundamental predictions of unusual phases (particularly topological phases) that do not fit conventional paradigms and do not have conventional local order parameters. With Moore and Rezayi, he discovered fractional quantum Hall (FQHE) states with non-abelian statistics, as well as Majorana fermion vortex and edge mode states in p+ip superconductors which shed new light on the FQHE. With Halperin and Lee, Read developed the gauge theory of composite Fermi liquid FQHE states at filling fraction nu=1/2 which successfully resolved a number of deep experimental puzzles. He developed a powerful 1/N expansion method for the strongly-interacting Kondo and heavy-fermion models by representing them as constrained systems and using gauge-theory methods. Using similar methods, he studied models of quantum anti-ferromagnets, and showed that the phases without Neel order can be understood using gauge theory ideas. These phases include spin-Peierls states, and featureless 'spin-liquid' resonating valence bond states that can be identified as topological phases, essentially the same as the toric code now of great interest in topological quantum computation. In conformal field theory (CFT), Read has obtained important results on irrational CFTs arising from loop models, in particular for percolation and the spin quantum Hall transition, using exact algebraic techniques.