Dr Jing Xia receiving his prize
Dr Jing Xia is the 2011 recipient of the Lee Osheroff Richardson North American Science Prize. Dr Xia has been presented with the prize at the Oxford Instruments Socialise with Science event at the APS2011 March show in Dallas, USA. Dr Xia has been working on topologically ordered condensed matter systems at low temperature and high magnetic fields. Topological order is a new kind of collective order beyond Landau's symmetry-breaking classifi cation. Certain types of topologically ordered materials including the "chiral pwave" superconductors and "non-Abelian" fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, both occurring at very low temperatures, may be used to realize fault-tolerant "topological"quantum computers that are immune from quantum decoherence.