Historical note on 2016 Physics Nobel
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.3645
The coverage of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics (Physics Today, December 2016, page 14 ) was enjoyable, particularly because my colleague David Thouless shared in the prize. The piece states, correctly, that in the 1930s “Rudolf Peierls argued convincingly that in [two-dimensional] materials, the thermal motions of atoms would prevent long-range order from being established.” However, the case Peierls made in his 1935 article 1 was a variant of a 1930 argument by Felix Bloch 2 that thermally excited magnons would prevent the establishment of long-range order in two-dimensional Heisenberg magnets.
References
1. R. E. Peierls, Ann. Inst. Henri Poincare 5, 177 (1935). http://www.numdam.org/item?id=AIHP_1935__5_3_177_0
2. F. Bloch, Z. Phys. 61, 206 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01339661
More about the authors
Michael Schick, (schick@phys.washington.edu) University of Washington, Seattle.
