Moore Foundation grantee Alexei Kitaev at Caltech and Xiao-Gang Wen of MIT were awarded the American Physical Society's 2017 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, which recognizes and encourages outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics.
Kitaev, an expert in quantum computation and related areas of theoretical physics, is a grantee through Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. Wen was a distinguished Moore Scholar at Caltech in 2006 and 2007.
The Buckley Prize was endowed in 1952 by AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent) and is currently co-sponsored with the HTC-VIA Group as a means of recognizing outstanding scientific work. It is named in memory of Oliver E. Buckley, an influential president of Bell Labs.
The citation notes the pair's contribution to "the understanding of topological order and its consequences in a broad range of physical systems, including the fractional quantum Hall effect, frustrated magnets, and topological states protected by symmetry."
Learn more about topological states of matter here.
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