Nicholas Read

For other people named Nicholas Read, see Nicholas Read (disambiguation).

Nicholas Read FRS (born 1958) is an American physicist, noted for his work on strongly interacting quantum many-body systems.

Nicholas Read FRS
Born	(1958-11-22) November 22, 1958 (age 66) London, England
Alma mater	Imperial College London Cambridge University
Known for	Composite fermion model for quantum Hall systems
Awards	Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (2002)
Scientific career
Fields	Condensed matter theory
Institutions	Yale University

Biography

Read was born in London, England on November 22, 1958^[1] and did his undergraduate education at Cambridge University. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London,^[1] after which he moved to the United States.^[2] 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, where he is Henry Ford II Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics and Mathematics.^[3]

Read's early work concerns understanding properties of rare-earth "heavy-fermion" compounds.^[3] Along with Greg Moore, he developed the theory of non-Abelian braiding statistics in quantum Hall systems. He developed a theory of composite fermions, which can be used to explain properties of free electron gas at high magnetic fields, in quantum Hall liquids and 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".^[3]

Honours

• Shared the 2002 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize
• Fellow of the American Physical Society^[2]
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Shared the 2015 Dirac Medal of ICTP^[4]
• Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2020^[5]