Dirac Medals Awarded to Condensed Matter Theorists

International Center for Theoretical Physics honors contributions to quantum computation

August 17, 2015

The International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, honored three physicists this weekend for their contributions to theoretical condensed matter physics. The organization awarded its annual Dirac Medal and Prize to Alexei Kitaev of the California Institute of Technology, Gregory W. Moore of Rutgers University, and Nicholas Read of Yale University. The award acknowledges “their interdisciplinary contributions which introduced the concepts of conformal field theory and non-abelian quasiparticle statistics in condensed matter systems and applied these ideas to quantum computation.”

The citation recognizes Moore and Read’s work on non-abelions in the quantum Hall effect, and Kitaev’s work using non-abelian anyons for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The winners receive an accompanying prize of $5000.

Kitaev previously won a MacArthur fellowship in 2008 and was an inaugural recipient of the Fundamental Physics Prize in 2012. Read is an APS Fellow and in 2002 was one of the recipients of APS’s Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize. Moore is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of APS. In 2014 he received APS’s Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.