Annual Nobel speculation thread
It’s that time of year again. The physics Nobel will be announced next Tuesday, and the chemistry prize on Wednesday. Who will it be this time? Please speculate in the comments. As is my annual futile tradition, I will put forward that the physics prize could be Aharonov and Berry for geometric phases in physics (even though Pancharatnam is intellectually in there and died in 1969). This is a long shot, as always. Last year was neural networks. Astro is probably “due”, but who knows. On the chem side, last year was computational protein design and AlphaFold.
25 comments:
Twisted graphene?
Not sure who, but my guess is someone in the general area of topological quantum matter/information.
I’m still riding the high from predicting Hopfield on this blog last year. Maybe I’ll get lucky again!
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero would be a recipient for twisted graphene, right?
Weyl fermions, M. Zahid Hasan could also get it.
On second thought, I wonder if I should go with Gautam and change my guess to twisted graphene as well. I hadn’t thought of it but maybe it is a more likely condensed matter / quantum choice, since topology has already been recognized in 2016…
I also vote for Aharanov and Berry. In the 20th century, "Berry phase" appeared in 174 PRL papers. In the 21st century, it appeared in 1310!
If we’re going astro, we’re well overdue for a prize honoring the WMAP and Planck satellite teams for measuring the geometry of the universe and confirming Inflation predictions of flatness and nearly scale-invariant (n<~1) Gaussian primordial fluctuations. Or if they want to avoid honoring large collaborations, a prize to Guth, Linde, and Steinhardt for the theory that they confirmed.
Donald Trump for discoveries related to cranial hot air containment beyond all known records. People say this is yuge.
Hahahahaha!!
If there is another topology prize presumably at least one of the recipients will be Charlie Kane.
I’d like to see a prize for quantum dynamics but I think we’ll have to wait a while for that one.
Another possibility (not yet raised in this thread) is a prize for quantum algorithms. This could be a `pure theory' prize (say, Peter Shor and Umesh Vazirani). Or it could be something like eg 1/2 to Peter Shor and 1/2 to Google Quantum AI.
My money is on Shor, Deutch, and Bennett (maybe drop Bennett and add Vazirani?) for launching the quantum industry --- particularly being that this is the year of the quantum. I love the twisted vanderwaals field, but despite how cool it is, it hasn't had anything near the impact that the drive for quantum computing has. I've bet on Berry and Aharnov in the past but as I learned more about the history I leaned more against. In both cases there was earlier work that makes it difficult to choose them: Pancharatnam before Berry, and Ehrenberg&Siday before Aharanov and Bohm. Bohm quickly conceded that the AB effect was not original. Maybe Berry is sufficiently different from Pancharatnam, but it still looks unlikely to me. I'd love a Charlie Kane prize too, or even an Anyon prize, but I'm not holding my breath.
@Anon at 12:05 PM - I don't exactly understand what you mean by quantum dynamics. Could you please clarify what specific discovery / application you mean?
(that was me - thought I was logged in). The 2019 prize for Peebles might be seen as preparatory to this sort of award. See also: the Higgs boson discovery, which prompted an award for Higgs & Englert but, as of yet, no prize for those who built / led the LHC, CMS, and ATLAS experiments that made the discovery.
If there was any justice, BPZ. But unlikely
Nonequilibrium dynamics. The sort of stuff starting with many body localization and developing from there. I don’t think we will see that this year but I think we will eventually.
Indeed. I feel like even most physicists, outside of high energy theory and stat mech, don’t fully appreciate the significance of this paper (myself included).
Am in stat mech, and still don’t appreciate it. CFT is a frightfully narrow niche.
The impact of 2D CFT has been legion. To name only one: braiding and fusion of anyons, topological QFT (which is the modern framework for topological phases of matter, not just topological order).
I think one of the challenges is that it’s an exceptionally deep and important subject, but it takes even experienced physicists a long time to understand its significance. This is in contrast to, say, the action principle and Lagrangians, which is something that students can begin to appreciate the importance of even as undergraduates.
I wonder if there is any meaningful way to introduce some of these ideas of CFT and their significance earlier on in the physics curriculum so that more physicists understand how important it is.
Eli Yablonovitch, Sajeev John, John Pendry - Photonic crystals and Metamaterials (Optics with structured matter kind of basket?).
My top prediction is Metamaterials with negative refractive index, going to John Pendry (theory) and David Smith (experiment).
Is it just a matter of time before twisted bilayer graphene wins a prize? This might go to Allan MacDonald (theory) and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (experiment).
I have written a post with some "principles" we might consider when making such predictions and which discuss some of the suggestions above.
https://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2025/10/nobel-prize-predictions-for-2025.html
I welcome comments there or here.
Pizza, I think it is possible to include some _outcomes_ of CFT in the curriculum, although maybe only at the graduate level. Cardy has a book that does a good job with this. In terms of impact, to a modern condensed matter theory audience, one point is the outsized impact Kitaev has had on our field. Many of his key results (Ising anyons and topological quantum computation, SYK) are directly inspired by and/or use methods from CFT. (There is a line in the "other" Kitaev paper, the spin liquid honeycomb model, about how he waited too long to publish it as he was trying to lessen the background requirements from CFT).
- (Anonymous 5:31, 9:33)
Thanks Matthew. Very illuminating.
I wonder if Kitaev could be an odds-on favorite now, given his impact on so many of the posited possible award categories (topology, quantum information, CFT).
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