Nicholas Read

Biography

Read was born in Britain in 1958 and did his undergraduate education at Cambridge University. He completed his PhD at Imperial College, London after which he moved to the United States. Read worked as a post-doctoral researcher, first at Brown University, and then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Yale University as an assistant professor in 1988, where he is Henry Ford II Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics and Mathematics.

Read's early work concerns understanding properties of rare-earth "heavy-fermion" compounds. Along with Greg Moore, he developed the theory of non-Abelian braiding statistics in quantum Hall systems. He developed a theory of "composite fermions", which can be used to explain properties of free electron gas at high magnetic fields, in quantum Hall liquids and half-filled Landau levels. Read was awarded the 2002 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize together with Jainendra Jain and Robert Willet "For theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems".