Phua Kok Khoo - Böcker

Professor Kerson Huang was a well respected theoretical physicist, who was also well versed in English and Chinese literature. He was born in Nanning, China, on 15 March 1928, and he was a fellow at the IAS, Princeton, from 1955-1957 before joining the faculty of MIT. He remained there until he retired from teaching in 1999. His research in theoretical physics included works on Bose-Einstein condensation and quantum field theory. In his long and illustrious career, Prof. Huang has worked with many prominent physicists. In 1957, he published a theory known as the hard-sphere model for Bose gases with Nobel Laureates Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee. With Noble Laureate Steven Weinberg, he studied the ultimate temperature and the thermodynamics of early universe. While he was at Princeton, he also worked with atomic bomb developer J. Robert Oppenheimer. In recently years, Prof. Huang had been a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and worked on both biophysics and quantum cosmology.This memorial volume is dedicated to Prof. Huang who passed away peacefully at home on September 1, 2016 at the age of 88. The volume features the recollections of Prof. Huang by his former colleagues and students, including Profs Chen-Ning Yang and Samuel Ting, as well as their reflections on Prof. Huang's achievements in the various subdivisions of physics.

Geometry and topology have been a fascination in physics since the start of the 20th century. A leading example is Einstein's geometrical theory of gravity. At the beginning of the 1970s, topological ideas entered areas of condensed matter physics. These advances were driven by new seminal ideas resolving a serious contradiction between experiment and the standard interpretation of a rigorous mathematical theorem which led to the study of new exotic topological phases of matter. Topological defect driven phase transitions in thin, two dimensional films of superfluids, superconductors and crystals have provided great insight into the mechanism governing these topological phases present in those physical systems. Moreover, many of these topological properties remain 'protected' against disorder and topological distortion perturbations. An example of possible applications of such robustness to perturbations is in the search for encoding information in quantum computers, potentially providing the platform for fault-tolerant quantum computations.In the past four decades, the discovery of topological phases engendered great interest in condensed matter physics. It also attracted the attention of researchers working on quantum information, quantum materials and simulations, high energy physics and string theory. This unique volume contains articles written by some of the most prominent names in the field, including Nobel Laureate John Michael Kosterlitz and Professor Jorge V José. They originate from talks and discussions by leading experts at a recent workshop. They review previous works as well as addressing contemporary developments in the most pressing and important issues on various aspects of topological phases and topological phase transitions.