On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics to three British physicists — with half the prize shared by David J. Thouless and F. Duncan M. Haldane and the other half going to J. Michael Kosterlitz — "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter." The three scientists "opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states," the academy explained, using "advanced mathematical methods to study unusual phases, or states, of matter, such as superconductors, superfluids, or thin magnetic films."
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