Nicholas Read

Nicholas Read (born November 22, 1958) is a British-born American physicist, noted for his work on strongly interacting quantum many-body systems, particularly topological phases of matter and the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Biography Read was born in London, England on November 22, 1958. He was educated at Langley Park School for Boys in Beckenham and completed his undergraduate education at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in Mathematics in 1980 and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics the following year. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London in 1986, Read worked as a post-doctoral researcher, first at Brown University, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Yale University as an assistant professor in 1988, and was promoted to professor of physics and applied physics in 1995. In 2012, he was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Physics. He also holds appointments as Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Mathematics, and is a member of the Yale Quantum Institute.

Research Read's early work concerned the properties of rare-earth "heavy-fermion" compounds, for which he developed a 1/N expansion method using gauge-theory techniques to treat the strongly interacting Kondo and heavy fermion models as constrained systems.

Fractional quantum Hall effect Read is best known for his work on the fractional quantum Hall effect. Together with Greg Moore, he proposed the Moore–Read state, a Pfaffian trial wavefunction for the quantum Hall plateau at filling fraction 5/2 that supports quasiparticle excitations obeying non-Abelian braiding statistics. Such excitations could in principle be used for topological quantum computation, storing quantum information non-locally and thereby achieving robustness against decoherence. With B. I. Halperin and P. A. Lee, Read developed the HLR theory, a Chern–Simons gauge theory of composite fermion Fermi liquid states at filling fraction ν = 1/2, which successfully explained a number of experimental puzzles in half-filled Landau levels. Read was awarded the 2002 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize together with Jainendra Jain and Robert Willet "For theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems".

Majorana zero modes and paired superfluids With Dmitry Green, Read showed that p-wave (px + ipy) paired superfluids in two dimensions support Majorana zero modes bound to vortex cores, connecting the physics of paired superfluids to the non-Abelian statistics of the Moore–Read quantum Hall state.

Hall viscosity Read introduced the concept of Hall viscosity, a non-dissipative transport coefficient analogous to the Hall conductivity, and showed that it is quantized in gapped or topological phases of quantum fluids, being related to the mean orbital spin per particle.

Other contributions Using gauge-theory and large-N methods applied to quantum antiferromagnets, Read showed that phases without Néel order can be understood as topological phases, including spin-Peierls states and featureless spin-liquid resonating valence bond states that are essentially equivalent to the toric code.

Honours and awards Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship Member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2017) Member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (elected 2018) Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2020