Duncan Haldane

F. Duncan M. Haldane ( born 14 September 1951 in London ) is a British physicist who works in theoretical solid state physics.

Haldane studied at Cambridge University (Bachelor 1973), where he received his doctorate in 1978. 1977 to 1981 he worked at the Institute Laue -Langevin. 1981 to 1985 he was Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. 1985 to 1987 he was with Bell Laboratories. From 1987 he was a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and in 1990 at Princeton University.

Haldane examined Vielteilchenprobleme in solid-state physics with nonperturbative methods, including the quantum Hall effect, Luttinger liquids, anyons ( particles with unusual statistics) and one-dimensional integrable systems. For an explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, he suggested 1982, an extension of the model by Robert Laughlin, whose wave function was not defined for all fractional filling factors. In 1983, he suggested (then surprisingly) the existence of a Haldane Gap ( gap in the spectrum of excitations) for integer spins in one-dimensional antiferromagnets before ( but the gap does not exist for spin 1/2 excitations).

In 1993 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, 2012, the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. 1984 to 1988 he was a Sloan Fellow. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics.