Kosterlitz

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A Scottish-born physicist who shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work on topological phase transitions
2. The surname of a British physicist who shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Thouless and Duncan Haldane
3. A family name borne by a physicist recognized for theoretical work on two-dimensional phase transitions in superfluids and magnets

Etymology: Kosterlitz is a surname, and the word that bears it is the eponym of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, a phase change in two-dimensional physics. The name belongs to John Michael Kosterlitz, a Scottish-born physicist who, with David Thouless, showed in 1972 and 1973 that certain two-dimensional systems can undergo a transition driven by the pairing and unpairing of vortices, even though long-range order cannot exist in such systems at finite temperature. The Mermin-Wagner theorem had seemed to rule out this kind of ordering, and the work overturned the expectation that two-dimensional matter could only be disordered or fully ordered. Kosterlitz and Thouless shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics with Duncan Haldane for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. The term "Kosterlitz-Thouless transition" was adopted in the physics literature, and it is the name physicists use for the transition itself rather than for any general-purpose word.