2019 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research Awarded to Bertrand I. Halperin

“Bertrand Halperin is a giant in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics,” said APS President-Elect David Gross, chair of the medal selection committee. “His many contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of phase transitions, of low-dimensional quantum phenomena, of the quantum Hall effect, and his pioneering work on the role of topology in both classical and quantum systems have shaped condensed matter theory over the last 40 years, bringing it to bear on the understanding of many experiments.”

The Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research is the largest APS prize to recognize researchers from all fields of physics and is funded by a donation from entrepreneur Jay Jones. Previous recipients were Edward Witten (2016), Daniel Kleppner (2017), and Eugene Parker (2018).

“Bert is among our most distinguished APS Members,” said APS Chief Executive Officer Kate Kirby. “It's hard to imagine someone more deserving of the APS flagship honor, the 2019 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research.”

Halperin received his A.B. degree from Harvard in 1961, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. Following a postdoctoral year in Paris, he spent ten years at Bell Laboratories and then joined the Harvard physics faculty in 1976.

While Halperin’s early work centered on the behavior of classical critical systems and properties of systems with frozen disorder, his recent work has focused more on quantum properties of electrons in confined geometries, especially two-dimensional electron systems in a strong magnetic field. Topological aspects of his work include the roles of dislocations and disclinations in two-dimensional melting, of vortices in the superfluid transition, and of edge states, fractional statistics, and emergent gauge fields in quantum Hall systems.

Among his many honors, Halperin is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to his APS awards, he received the Dannie Heineman Prize of the Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften, the Lars Onsager Lecture and Medal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, an honorary doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Lise Meitner Lecture and Medal, and the Wolf Prize in Physics.

The formal award will be made at a ceremony in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2019. In addition, Halperin is invited to give a presentation on his work at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston (March 4-8). The Medal is accompanied by a prize of $50,000.

For more on the award visit the APS Medal page.