Nobel Prizes 2016

Both the Chemistry and Physics Nobel Prizes this year share the distinction of being material and molecular studies that have revealed much about the nature of matter but both also hint at new technology with a wide range of implications.

Tuesday, 4th October 2016, saw the announcement of the Physics prize, with half going to David J. Thouless of the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, and the other half to F. Duncan M. Haldane Princeton University, NJ and J. Michael Kosterlitz Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. The prize recognizes their theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. All three scientists are British born.

The scientists unlocked the secrets of exotics phases of matter using mathematics to help us understand the behavior and properties of superconductors, superfluids, and thin magnetic films. More specifically, they used topology, the branch of mathematics that describes continuous transitions from one shape or structure to another, that are preserved, deformations such as stretching and bending as opposed to tearing or gluing. The mathematics applies equally to abstract entities such as spacetime and black holes as well as everyday objects such as teacups and doughnuts as well as materials at the molecular and atomic levels.

In the early 1970s, Kosterlitz and Thouless overturned the theory that superconductivity or superfluidity could not exist in thin layers. They showed that superconductivity could occur at low temperatures and also explained the mechanism, a phase transition, that leads to the loss of superconductivity as the temperature rises above a critical point. In the 1980s, Thouless also explained earlier experiments with very thin electrically conducting layers and showed that topology could explain this too. Meanwhile, Haldane discovered how topology could explain the magnetic properties of certain materials.

A day later, the Chemistry prize was announced and will be shared by Jean-Pierre Sauvage of the University of Strasbourg, France, British-born Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA, and Bernard L. Feringa of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. The prize this year is in recognition of the design and synthesis of molecular machines. Such a terse phrase belies the true enormity of their efforts of many years wherein they are laying the foundations for devices that work on a scale much smaller than any manufactured system and in some sense on a par with the machinery of living cells.

Sauvage took his first step towards a molecular machine in 1983 when he linked two ring-shaped molecules to form a catenane. Stoddart's work then extended this concept in 1991 to the so-called rotaxanes, a ring on a string, molecular system. And, in 1999 Feringa built a molecular motor. Together these three developments operating in parallel could one day allow technologists to build devices from the successors to these molecules.

David Bradley blogs at Sciencebase Science Blog and tweets @sciencebase, he is author of the popular science book "Deceived Wisdom".