17 Facts About Piers Coleman

Piers Coleman was born on 1958 and is a British-born theoretical physicist, working in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics.

Piers Coleman was raised in Cheltenham, England, where he attended Cheltenham Grammar School, graduating in 1976.

Piers Coleman completed his undergraduate education at Trinity College, Cambridge, pursuing the Natural Sciences Tripos and the Mathematics Tripos part III under the mentorship of Gilbert Lonzarich.

Piers Coleman was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he held from 1983 to 1988.

Piers Coleman was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Santa Barbara from 1984 to 1986.

Piers Coleman joined the faculty at Rutgers University in 1987.

In 2011, Piers Coleman replaced David Pines as a director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter.

Piers Coleman is known for his work related to strongly correlated electron systems, and in particular, the study of magnetism, superconductivity and topological insulators.

Piers Coleman is the author of the popular text Introduction to Many-Body Physics.

In 1983 Piers Coleman invented the slave boson formulation of the Hubbard operators, which involves the factorization of a Hubbard operator into a canonical fermion and a boson.

In 1992, Piers Coleman, Miranda and Tsvelik examined the application of the Majorana representation of spins to the Kondo lattice, showing that if local moments fractionalize as Majorana, rather than Dirac fermions, the resulting ground-state is an odd-frequency superconductor.

In 2008, the team of Maxim Dzero, Kai Sun and Victor Galitski and Piers Coleman predicted that the class of Kondo insulators can develop a topological ground-state, proposing samarium hexaboride as a Topological Kondo Insulator.

Piers Coleman is married to the American theoretical physicist Premala Chandra and they have two sons.

Piers Coleman is the elder brother of musician and composer Jaz Coleman.

The concert has pieces composed by Jaz Piers Coleman, based on themes from physics such as quantum criticality, emergence and symmetry breaking.

Piers Coleman has produced a short documentary on Emergence with Paul Chaikin, as part of the Annenberg series Physics in the 21st Century.

Piers Coleman's research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Theory, and the Department of Energy, division of Basic Energy Sciences.