2015 Dirac Medallists announced
The Dirac Medals are given every year by The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) at Trieste, Italy. This year’s medallists have been announced by ICTP. The 2015 Dirac Medals have been awarded to Alexei Kitaev (California Institute of Technology), Gregory W. Moore (Rutgers University) and Nicholas Read (Yale University) for their interdisciplinary contributions which introduced the concepts of conformal field theory and non-abelian quasiparticle statistics in condensed matter systems and applied these ideas to quantum computation. Their work has played a fundamental role in recent advances in our understanding of the quantum states of matter and quantum entanglement theory.
ICTP’s Dirac Medal, first awarded in 1985, is given in honour of P.A.M. Dirac, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and a staunch friend of the ICTP. It is awarded annually on Dirac’s birthday, 8 August, to scientists who have made significant contributions to theoretical physics. The Medal is not awarded to Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists or Wolf Prize winners, but many of the awardees have since won Nobels, Fields Medals, Wolf Prizes and Fundamental Physics Prizes.