F. Duncan Haldane

Princeton University

Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane is a British–American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate at Princeton University. He is best known for the Haldane conjecture — the prediction that spin chains with integer spin have a gapped ground state while half-integer spin chains are gapless — which fundamentally altered our understanding of one-dimensional quantum magnets. Haldane also discovered topological phases in one-dimensional systems and contributed foundational results to the theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect. His work on topological insulators and semimetals has direct relevance to the design of low-power electronics and quantum computing architectures. Haldane shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics with Thouless and Kosterlitz. His theoretical predictions, initially met with skepticism, were confirmed experimentally and now guide the engineering of topological quantum materials at leading research institutions and technology companies worldwide.