A Londoner and two other British scientists have been given the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries about “strange matter”.
Trio Duncan Haldan, David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz have today been announced as this year’s recipients of the prize and will share the 8m kroner (£727,000) winnings.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named them at a press conference in Sweden and the Nobel Committee said their work “opened the door on an unknown world”.
It is hoped the discoveries will pave the way for designing new materials with unusual properties.
Professor Haldane, who was born in 1951 in London, said: "I was very surprised and very gratified.
"The work was a long time ago but it's only now that a lot of tremendous new discoveries are based on this original work, and have extended it."
The three scientists, who now all live and work in the US, used maths to explain unexpected behaviour in states of matter which are rare.
Professors Kosterlitz, from Aberdeen, and Thouless, from Bearsden in Scotland, looked at phenomena which arise in flat forms or two dimensional forms of matter.
Acting chairman of the Nobel committee, Prof Nils Mårtensson, said: "This has paved the way for designing new materials with novel properties and there is great hope that this will be important for many future technologies."
Thors Hans Hansson, one of the members of the Nobel committee, used a bagel, pretzel and cinnamon bun to try and explain the work the trio of scientists have done.
He said the only difference to someone working in the field of topology – which is what the scientists did – is the number of holes.
