Kosterlitz, John Michael (1942-…), a British-American physicist, won a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for his theoretical discoveries involving unusual phases, or states, of matter . He and the British physicist F. Duncan M. Haldane each won a quarter of the prize. The British-born American physicist David J. Thouless won the other half.
In 1973, Kosterlitz and Thouless, both researchers the University of Birmingham in England, proposed a hypothesis to describe how a thin film of atoms transitions to a superfluid. A superfluid is an exotic state of matter that acts like a liquid that flows absolutely freely. Kosterlitz and Thouless’s hypothesis treated the film as a liquid with microscopic whirlpools moving freely through it. As the film is lowered to a critical temperature, some whirlpools pair up with others rotating in the opposite direction and part of the film becomes a superfluid. Other physicists provided experimental confirmation of this hypothesis in 1978.
Kosterlitz was born in June 22, 1943, in Aberdeen, Scotland. He received a B.A. degree in 1965 and an M.A. degree in 1966, both from Cambridge University in England. He earned a Ph.D. degree in high-energy physics from Oxford University in 1969. He served in various positions at the University of Birmingham from 1970 to 1981, except for a period from 1973 to 1974, when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1982, Kosterlitz became a professor of physics at Brown University in Rhode Island.
